Christa Davis Acampora, Angela Cotten - Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul. Transformative Aesthetics and The Practice of Freedom

Unmaking Race,
Remaking Soul
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Unmaking Race,
Remaking Soul
Transformative Aesthetics and the
Practice of Freedom
Edited by
Christa Davis Acampora
and
Angela L. Cotten
State University of New York Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Unmaking race, remaking soul : transformative aesthetics and the practice of freedom / edited by
Christa Davis Acampora, Angela L. Cotten.
v. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: Joy A. James, “‘tragedy fatigue’ and ‘aesthetic agency,’” Christa Davis Acampora, “on
making and remaking: an introduction” — Resisting imagination — Ritch Calvin, “writing the
xicanista : Ana Castillo and the articulation of chicana feminist aesthetics” — Kelly Oliver,
“everyday revolutions, shifting power, and feminine genius in Julia Alvarez’s fiction” — Christa
Davis Acampora, “authorizing desire : erotic poetics and the aesthesis of freedom in Morrison and
Shange “ — Body agonistes — Martha Mockus, “meshell ndegéocello : musical articulations of
Black feminism” — Kimberly Lamm, “portraits of the past, imagined now : reading the work of
Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems” — Eduardo Mendieta, “the coloniality of embodiment :
Coco Fusco’s postcolonial genealogies and semiotic agonistics” — Changing the subject — Ruth
Porritt, “pueblo sculptor Roxanne Swentzell : forming a wise, generous, and beautiful ‘I am’” —
Phoebe Farris, “the syncretism of Native American, Latin American, and African American —
Women’s art : visual expressions of feminism, the environment, spirituality, and identity” —
Nandita Gupta, “dalit women’s literature : a sense of the struggle” — Home is where the art is :
shaping space and place — Ailsa I. Smith, “the role of ‘place’ in New Zealand Maori songs of
lament” — Katherine Wilson, “theatre near us : librarians, culture, and space in the Harlem
Renaissance” — Jaye T. Darby, “into the sacred circle, out of the melting pot : re/locations and
homecomings in native women’s theater”.
ISBN 978-0-7914-7161-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Aesthetics. I. Acampora, Christa Davis, 1967– II. Cotten, Angela L., 1968–
BH39.U56 2007
111'.85—dc22
2006032684
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Christa’s brave and creative mother, Frances,
and
Angela’s wise and generous mother, Mary
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Foreword: “Tragedy Fatigue” and “Aesthetic Agency” xi

Joy James
Acknowledgments xv
On Making and Remaking: An Introduction 1

I. RESISTING IMAGINATION
1 Writing the Xicanista: Ana Castillo and the

Articulation of Chicana Feminist Aesthetics 21
Ritch Calvin
2 Everyday Revolutions, Shifting Power,

and Feminine Genius in Julia Alvarez’s Fiction 47
Kelly Oliver
3 Authorizing Desire: Erotic Poetics and the

AISTHESIS of Freedom in Morrison and Shange 59
II. BODY AGONISTES
4 MeShell Ndegéocello: Musical Articulations

of Black Feminism 81
Martha Mockus
5 Portraits of the Past, Imagined Now: Reading

the Work of Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson 103
Kimberly Lamm
vii
viii CONTENTS
6 The Coloniality of Embodiment: Coco Fusco’s

Postcolonial Genealogies and Semiotic Agonistics 141
Eduardo Mendieta
III. CHANGING THE SUBJECT
7 Pueblo Sculptor Roxanne Swentzell:

Forming a Wise, Generous, and Beautiful “I Am” 161
Ruth Porritt
8 The Syncretism of Native American, Latin

American, and African American Women’s Art:
Visual Expressions of Feminism, the Environment,
Spirituality, and Identity 181
Phoebe Farris
9 Dalit Women’s Literature: A Sense of the Struggle 197

Nandita Gupta
IV. HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS:

SHAPING SPACE AND PLACE
10 The Role of “Place” in New Zealand

Ma\ori Songs of Lament 213
Ailsa L. Smith
11 Theater Near Us: Librarians, Culture,

and Space in the Harlem Renaissance 231
Katherine Wilson
12 Into the Sacred Circle, Out of the

Melting Pot: Re/Locations and Homecomings
in Native Women’s Theater 247
Jaye T. Darby
Works Cited 265
About the Contributors 283
Index 287
Illustrations
FIGURE 1.1 Ana Castillo, “Ourselves” 22

FIGURE 1.2 Ana Castillo, “Spirituality” 44
FIGURE 5.1 Carrie Mae Weems, “Mirror, Mirror” (from
Ain’t Jokin’ ) (1987–1988) 104
FIGURE 5.2 Lorna Simpson, “Twenty Questions
(A Sampler)” (1986) 106
FIGURE 5.3 Carrie Mae Weems, “You Became Playmate to
the Patriarch” from From Here I Saw What
Happened and I Cried (1995–1996) 113
FIGURE 5.4 Carrie Mae Weems, “And Their Daughter”
from From Here I Saw What Happened and I
Cried (1995–1996) 114
FIGURE 5.5 Lorna Simpson, “Three Seated Figures” (1989) 119
FIGURE 5.6 Lorna Simpson, “Portrait” (1988) 121
FIGURE 5.7 Lorna Simpson, “Stereo Styles” (1988) 123
FIGURE 5.8 Lorna Simpson, “Five Day Forecast” (1988) 125
FIGURE 5.9 Lorna Simpson, “Untitled (Prefer, Refuse,
Decide)” (1989) 130
FIGURE 5.10 Carrie Mae Weems, “Van and Vera with Kids
in the Kitchen” from Family Pictures and
Stories (1978–1984) 133
FIGURE 5.11 Lorna Simpson, “Details” (1996) 139
FIGURE 6.1 Coco Fusco and Guillermmo Gómez-Pena,
“Two Undiscovered Amerindians” 150
FIGURE 6.2 Coco Fusco, “Stuff ” 152
ix
x ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURE 6.3 Video still, Coco Fusco, “The Incredible

Disappearing Woman” (2003) 157
FIGURE 7.1 Roxanne Swentzell, Making Herself, 2000 171
FIGURE 7.2 Roxanne Swentzell, Pinup, 2000 175
FIGURE 7.3 Roxanne Swentzell, Soaking in the Sun, 1990 177
FIGURE 7.4 Roxanne Swentzell, Window to the Past, 2000 178
FIGURE 11.1 “Party for Langston Hughes on roof of 580
St. Nicholas Avenue, Harlem” (1924) 235
FIGURE 11.2 “Scene from Harlem Experimental Theater
production of Climbing Jacob’s Ladder by
Regina Anderson Andrews” (1924) 237
Foreword
“Tragedy Fatigue” and “Aesthetic Agency”
Last spring, preparing to leave for a University of California conference

on “black thought in the age of terror,” I tuned into the local public radio
station and heard a BBC report on “tragedy fatigue” in Australia. The
reporters narrated, among news of varied atrocities on aboriginal lands
committed by aboriginal men, the stitching together of an infant follow-
ing a rape (the mothers of the victims, I was told, were out drinking when
the assaults occurred).
Make a face.
Our very horrors function as infomercials and markers of our limi-
tations, and currency for the entertainment of trauma tourists, and justi-
fication for corporate-state punitive cultures to expand in their violence.
We are inundated by trauma sites and tragedies—from invasions,
occupations, and failed democracies punctured by insurgencies’ improvised
explosive devices (or IEDs) to reflections on shoot-to-kill edicts that dictate
to conscientious (black) mothers to first obtain bullet proof vests before
securing bottled water, baby formula, and pampers for those abandoned by
the state in post-Katrina New Orleans. (A survival guide that addresses
black female expendability might prove a very useful cultural handbook.)
Those who create and perform in the academy are indeed indebted
to those outside or those who “straddle” to theorize and make theory into
politics as aesthetic agency that counters empire.
Christa Acampora writes in the introduction to the volume, a trib-
ute to Gloria Anzaldúa, of aesthetic agency as social and political progress
engendered not only by conventional intellectual or cognitive develop-
ment but also by sensibilities that hone perceptions or critiques and
inspire creative political acts.
Such aesthetic agency likely creates a resting place, a haven for strug-
gle to continue. A “home” of sorts. Where else would transformative aes-
thetics exist in the practice of freedom if not in our lives at home, beyond
the closets of corporatist or statist academia.
xi
xii FOREWORD
Cultural production that creates a breathing space, or momentarily

stops breath, allows us to pause to catch our thinking and move in a dif-
ferent way in pursuit of freedom. Such work is both necessary and alien-
ating. Some domiciles, particularly those for most (black) women of
color, often pose the inverse of the dominant cliché cemented in senti-
mental family values: in which “A man’s home is his castle” becomes “A
black woman’s home is her bomb shelter.”
Would it matter if the poor or rich (white) man’s castle has less or
more resale value than the rich or poor woman’s bomb shelter (once she
has removed all black family photos for the prospective buyers)? Labor to
culturally produce is necessary because everyone must shelter. But per-
haps the necessary labor is to no longer seek culture as reified real estate,
to improve on property values by aspiring to some developer’s fantasy of
gated community.
“Tragedy fatigue” manifests not only among the invaded and colo-
nized, among the impoverished or caged in penal sites that double as
trauma sites. It is the hallmark of imperial ambitions and the corporate, sta-
tist, militarist, or academic agents that further or counter those ambitions.
Exhausted by struggle, captivated by the idea of freedom, seeking
relief and an alternative to the reality of empire—where the breaking of
souls and bodies is routine, as patriotism, patriarchy, (hetero)sexism, or
racism—some create an altered reality through aesthetic production and
political action. Such production might enable us to pass from this cur-
rent reality of growing police powers and concentrations of wealth and
avarice to another imagined or fabricated existence.
We can ask the price of the ticket to travel beyond a cultural and
political morass marked by terror in which state violence and domestic
violence seem to have an uncontested marriage in conventional thought.
But then, after inquiries, we balk at the cost for an altered reality: the
struggle of liberation that ensues from loving when one has gone beyond
one’s limits—beyond fatigue and beyond tragedy—to create something
revolutionary. Some, beyond their limits, perform in streets, such as Daisy
or “Miss Prissy” in David LaChappelle’s documentary RIZE. Through
their “Krump” dancing, they create new art forms and manifestations of
fused female identity and black identity in Los Angeles zones designated
as expendable, yet home to ecstatic or trance performances that transport
while remaining connected.
The cultural productions of those discussed in this volume frame
shelters. It is likely the making of shelters through cultural production,
not the structure itself, that offers some promise of protection, that
Foreword xiii
unmakes the stultified spaces that ban oxygen. Some labor in the service
of agency is alienated/alienating because its very intensity and relentless-
ness breed exhaustion: its own form of fatigue to counter tragedy.
All homes are not created equal. The castle has keep, serfs, servants,
slaves. Employees service edifices that buttress empire. The “castle,” like
the academy, presumes a stability and presence, a production of culture
tied to the reproduction of dominance in the form of “nation” and “fam-
ily” and “culture” and their “values,” guarded by fortress walls and polic-
ing apparatuses shaped by white supremacy, class, and warfare against
queerness—all have agency to destabilize what threatens and to promote
impermanence as permanent in an ongoing siege.
What is a resting place for an “academic homemaker”? Is it a domi-
cile from which to speculate and participate in struggle? Is it a space of
perceived freedom and presumed mobility distant from street fighting
and artistic production in nonelite communities? And what constitutes
such “freedom” as cultural production or interrogation or affection or
agency? The labor intensity of shape shifting the academy into a politi-
cally relevant residence is the homemaker’s private and public joke, dis-
torting her face into something beyond grimace. The satire of some cul-
tural productions should leave us laughing, with the subversion inspired
by the creation.
To this tribute to Gloria Anzaldúa, I add mine and also celebrate,
with affection, the aesthetic agency of other (soon to be) ancestors: Bar-
bara Christian, Octavia Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Nina
Simone. At Eleggua’s crossroads, their offerings of aesthetic agency permit
our passage to cross over with brilliance, breath, and wry humor.
Joy James
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Jane Bunker and her assistants for guidance of this pro-
ject from its first draft to its last. Two anonymous reviewers made many
helpful suggestions that improved the organization of the volume gener-
ally and specific contributions particularly. The SUNY Women’s Studies
program and its co-sponsors generously supported a symposium in 2003
that made possible a gathering of several of the contributors, which
inspired spirited exchanges and buoyed us toward completing this book.
The Hunter College Philosophy Department and the Philosophy Pro-
gram at the CUNY Graduate Center provided some support for the man-
uscript preparation. Acting Dean Judith Friedlander and Acting Provost
Vita Rabinowitz, both at Hunter, provided funds that made it possible to
include images from the Schomberg Center of the New York Public
Library. We are grateful for this assistance. Most of all, we wish to express
gratitude to our contributors and the very many artists who inspired such
lively critique and discussion.
Photo of Ana Castillo “Ourselves” appears courtesy of Ana Castillo.

Photo of Ana Castillo “Spirituality” appears courtesty of Ana Castillo.
Photo by Margaret Randall.
Photos by Lorna Simpson appear courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.
Photos by Carrie Mae Weems appear courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems.
Photos and video stills of Coco Fusco appear courtesy of Coco Fusco.
Photos of sculptures by Roxanne Swentzell appear courtesy of Roxanne
Swentzell.
Photo of “Party for Langston Hughes” appears courtesy of the New York
Public Library.
Photo of Regina Andrews, “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” appears courtesy of
the New York Public Library.
xv
This is the story of a house. It has been lived in by many
people. Our grandmother, Baba, made this house living
space. She was certain that the way we lived was shaped by
objects, the way we looked at them, the way they were
placed around us. She was certain that we were shaped by
space. From her I learned about aesthetics, the yearning for
beauty that she tells me is the predicament of heart that
makes our passion real. A quiltmaker, she teaches me about
color. Her house is a place where I am learning to look at
things, where I am learning how to belong in space. In
rooms full of objects, crowded with things, I am learning to
recognize myself. She hands me a mirror, showing me how
to look. The color of wine she has made in my cup, the
beauty of the everyday. Surrounded by fields of tobacco, the
leaves braided like hair, dried and hung, circles and circles
of smoke fill the air. We string red peppers fiery hot, with
thread that will not be seen. They will hang in front of a
lace curtain to catch the sun. Look, she tells me, what the
light does to color! Do you believe that space can give life, or
take it away, that space has power? These are the questions
she asks which frighten me. Baba dies an old woman, out
of place. Her funeral is also a place to see things, to recog-
nize myself. How can I be sad in the face of death, sur-
rounded by so much beauty? Dead, hidden in a field of
tulips, wearing my face and calling my name. Baba can
make them grow. Red, yellow, they surround her body like
lovers in a swoon, tulips everywhere. Here a soul on fire
with beauty burns and passes, a soul touched by flame. We
see her leave. She has taught me how to look at the world
and see beauty. She has taught me “we must learn to see.”
(hooks 1990, 103)
On Unmaking and Remaking
An Introduction
(with obvious affection for Gloria Anzaldúa)
Our title for this volume makes obvious reference to Gloria Anzaldúa’s
magnificently rich collection of writings by feminists of color titled Mak-
ing Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras (1990). Her recent death is a loss
for all of us, and her passing warrants memorializing. In addition to her
two coedited collections, including This Bridge Called My Back: Writings
by Radical Women of Color (1981), Anzaldúa authored her own essays and
poetry, a book combining poetry and critical analysis titled Border-
lands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), and several works in children’s
literature. A common theme in her work is the significance of linguistic
expression and how it is central to the formation of one’s sense of self and
the possibilities for community. Her Borderlands explores the cultural
spaces between geographic, sexual, spiritual, and economic borders drawn
specifically to distinguish, isolate, and exclude those who are deemed
deviant from the dominant cultural interests. Although this book was well
underway prior to Anzaldúa’s death, we hope that it will serve in some
small way as a tribute by advancing the aims of her writings and editorial
labors.
In the introduction to Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras,
Anzaldúa describes “making face/haciendo caras” as an expression of feel-
ing (as in what one conveys when one “makes a face”), a kind of sharing
and communicating with others, a way of relating to them. Making face
can also carry political import in the form of “the piercing look that ques-
tions or challenges, the look that says, ‘Don’t walk all over me,’ the one
that says, ‘Get out of my face’” (Anzaldúa 1990, xv). Many of the cultural
productions discussed and presented in this volume incorporate both of
these senses in their meditations on the nature of community and social
justice.
1
2 CHRISTA DAVIS ACAMPORA
Anzaldúa further observes that the face at the body’s surface is also
the site for inscriptions of social structures in which, “We are ‘written’ all
over [. . .] carved and tattooed with the sharp needles of experience”
(1990, xv). A major premise of this book is that one of the ways in which
persons of color, but especially women of color, have effected an unmaking
of the face that marks them as female and gives them racial particularity
is through their cultural productions in which they aesthetically trans-
form the values that have been used to stain them as inferior, deficient,
and defective. Cultural productions such as those considered here consti-
tute efforts to elude and transform the “gaze” that constitutes such faces
and to remake oneself according to one’s own aesthetic sensibilities and
aspirations. This way of “looking back” locates women’s political resis-
tance in places not often recognized as legitimate sites of political contes-
tation. And yet it is, in part, because women are excluded or shunned
from more traditional venues of political organization against racial and
class oppression (specifically because of their gender) that they seek these
alternative modes and media of expression.
The facts that women have complicated and compromised access
to outlets for organized resistance and that their oppressors refuse to rec-
ognize them as legitimate contestants in the public sphere partly—but
only partly—explain why so many women have consciously sought trans-
formative social change through less traditional channels. Another rea-
son is that the kind of transformation or remaking sought requires dif-
ferent modes of expression. Many find they do not have the language to
simply rewrite the inscriptions that mark the faces of racism and sexism,
or they find that writing alone is insufficient for their task. Thus, women
of color have been leading innovators in remaking a variety of media in
the formal arts as well as in creative practices that lie outside those dom-
inant categories. Women working in the traditional arts have also sought
to blend or bend standard genres, developing novel forms such as chore-
opoetry (as in the case of Ntozake Shange 1981a). They also utilize
approaches that several contributors here describe as syncretic. Syncretism
involves drawing upon and incorporating a variety of traditions in the
making of something new that is nevertheless authentic and respectful of
traditions.
Syncretism is particularly significant as a strategic response to prob-
lems faced by women of color especially, as numerous authors here indi-
cate. Persons of color who endeavor to inhabit and nurture cultural spaces
outside of the traditions that define them as “other” and “outsider” face a
dilemma: they can cling to romantic notions of a cultural past from which
On Unmaking and Remaking 3
they are geographically and historically separated, or they can strive to

invent a culture anew. The former prong of this dilemma is often orga-
nized around an essentialized and static conception of culture generally,
and the latter seems too readily dismissive of the ways in which meanings
emerge from historical and situated contexts and are not simply the free-
wheeling inventions of individuals. The denial of metaphysical essential-
ism (often used as the basis for the subjection of others) differs from
recognition of “situational differences” insofar as the features that are
defined and used as the basis for “constructed” differences are understood
as having real material consequences with durable legacies. The contribu-
tors to this volume and the artists they discuss are mindful of this dis-
tinction and emphasize the constellation of interests and desires that
inform and shape their lived experiences.
This fact is relevant to the classical aesthetic concept of ‘disinter-
estedness,’ which was so prominent in European-centered conceptions
of aesthetics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and which
served as a criterion for the possible contemplation of true, genuine, or
“high” art. Disinterestedness—the idea that aesthetic objects are neces-
sarily disengaged from practical concerns—has fallen out of favor, at
least overtly, as a criterion for worthy aesthetic contemplation, although
it lives on with more subtlety in the ongoing debate about whether
political art can be appreciated primarily for its aesthetic qualities (see
Mullin 2003).
The aesthetic transformations of women of color are anything but
disinterested; indeed, they are often connected to lived, everyday experi-
ence, the practical realm of interests that comprise the social institutions
that limit and define their possible ways of being in the world. The artists
discussed here are concerned with exposing the (often hidden) racist, patri-
archal, and economic interests of others and of shaping and remaking a
form of interest or desire that is redemptive of the value of their experi-
ences and aspirations. We are, all of us, informed by a great variety of tra-
ditions and cultural values, and our conceptions of the lives we want as
ours are shaped by these forces, which are often in conflict. Early theoret-
ical formations of racial/ethnic oppression, including constructions of the
colonial in both postcolonial theory and anticolonial nationalism, tended
to elide gender differences in the experience of oppression. Many feminist
critics have shown, however, that gender was deployed strategically in
imperial and colonial practices and that women suffered at least two lay-
ers of oppression relating to their colonized and gendered bodies
(McClintock 1995, Suleri 1992, Mohanty 1991, Spivak 1995, Wallace
1979). By the same token European and North American feminists

(white and nonwhite alike) have sometimes misrepresented the problems
and interests of women in developing nations by analyzing their situa-
tions using theoretical models that are blind to the very differences that
define their particular situations (Oyewumi 2003, Mohanty 1991, hooks
1984). For many of the authors and artists whose contributions and
works are discussed here, what is meant by “making” and “remaking” soul
involves grappling with these challenges: a kind of critical relationality,
which “means negotiating, articulating and interrogating simultaneously
a variety of resistant discourses relationally and depending on context,
historical and political circumstances” (Davies 1994, 47).
The cultural productions of many artists, writers, and musicians
featured here can be read as their homes. As hooks puts it: these reposito-
ries of personal transformation and visions of beauty, art, and human pos-
sibility shelter and provide ground for the cultivation of new aesthetic
sensibilities, new ways of relating to others and to the world, and thus
new possibilities for building community and organizing resistance (e.g.,
1994a, 1994b). The very subtitle of this collection, Transformative Aes-
thetics and the Practice of Freedom, echoes a subtitle by bell hooks—Teach-
ing to Transgress: Education and the Practice of Freedom. In many of her
writings, hooks connects aesthetics and education to an ethic or practice
of freedom that enables and activates a resistive form of agency. Her writ-
ings explore in a variety of ways how educating the senses (drawing out
and cultivating them, as the Latin relative of the word education,
educere—to lead forth, suggests) and nurturing sensibility enable intellec-
tual, moral, and spiritual growth, activism, and community formation. In
her essay “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional,” hooks
heralds a radical aesthetic to be sought by progressive African Americans,
which would provide “vital grounding that helps make certain work pos-
sible, particularly expressive work that is transgressive and oppositional”
(hooks 1990, 110; compare and contrast with texts central to the Black
Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s [Baraka 1966, Fuller 1967, Gayle
1971, Sell 2001], which played a prominent role in the establishment of
black studies).
Each part of the book is comprised of chapters motivated by and explic-

itly oriented toward the idea that social and political progress requires
not only what is traditionally considered intellectual or cognitive devel-
opment but also expansion of the sensibilities that both sharpens our
perceptual capacities and fuels creativity activity. We call this “aesthetic
agency.” In designating this capacity for action “aesthetic,” we do not
imply a strict contrast with what the so-called western tradition
allegedly considers to be moral agency and its typical rational basis and
ideal of autonomy (we write “allegedly,” because there is a tradition
stretching back to Kant and further to Plato that connects morality and
aesthetics). Yet the exclusivity and presumed primacy of these condi-
tions for action (rationality, autonomy) are challenged in a variety of
ways by the women whose works are discussed in this volume. The
importance of individuality for identity, the conception of freedom as
independence or freedom from restraint, and the ideal of a universal
intelligence are questioned here without simply renouncing everything
conceived as emblematic of Euro-centered culture, including theory and
its applications. The core idea of aesthetic agency is that integral to our
understanding of the world is our capacity for making and remaking the
symbolic forms that supply the frameworks for the acquisition and
transmission of knowledge.
Thus, this new sensibility does not simply pertain to what is gener-
ally conceived as sheer emotional energy or what the western tradition
might designate (and, at times, denigrate) as mere “feeling.” Aesthetic sen-
sibility cultivates the senses, including that of sight: it nurtures a different
way of seeing. For many of the authors here, such “seeing” grounds a dif-
ferent cognitive perspective, a different way of understanding the world,
one’s place within it, and how the world might possibly be negotiated and
reorganized. Thus, aesthetic agency is liberating in a broad sense to
include the expansion not only of our capacity for joy but also our capac-
ities to know, to judge, and to act.
One of the purposes of this volume is to allow the distinctive ways of
seeing and feeling of women artists to become available for others to expe-
rience. We have conceived the designation of “artist” broadly so as to
include those working in a variety of cultural media, including artistic
practices other than those exercised in the formal arts. (This same interest
motivates our companion volume titled Cultural Sites of Critical Insight
2007.) To accomplish our aim, we have selected scholarly and theoretical
works that provide numerous illustrative examples, and we have included
visual reproductions of several works of art, most of which are not widely
accessible. This way of organizing the material and developing themes dis-
tinguishes this book from others, which either focus particularly on litera-
ture and literary theory (e.g., Bobo 2001), a particular cultural tradition
(e.g., Martinez 2000), primarily the productions of men (e.g., Gayle

1971, Powell 1997), or relevant issues of theory that nonetheless do not
explicitly consider the cultural innovations and reformations that are
advanced in the kinds of works discussed here (e.g., Gordon and Gordon
2006). These other volumes make their own significant contributions, so
we recommend them for those wishing to further develop ideas raised in
this text.
Many of the anthologies treating feminist aesthetics and the cultural
productions of women include only a few pieces that focus on the expe-
riences, theoretical perspectives, and self-consciously creative practices of
women of color (as an exception, see Shohat 1998). This is not to say that
the fine collections available, including a special issue of Hypatia, Women,
Art, and Aesthetics (Brand and Devereaux 2003), include no essays that are
relevant to, by, or about women of color (see also Hein and Korsmeyer
1993, Brand and Korsmeyer 1995, Allan 1995, and Ecker 1985); but
often their perspectives remain marginal or sparse. Our volume aims to
make the works and distinctive concerns of women of color more promi-
nent, to spur and supplement the growing body of work in this area.
Anthologies that are devoted primarily or exclusively to the works and
ideas of women of color, such as James’ and Sharpley-Whiting’s The Black
Feminist Reader (2000), Bobo’s Black Feminist Cultural Criticism (2001),
Brown and Gooze’s International Women’s Writings: New Landscapes of
Identity (1995), and Wisker’s Post-Colonial and African-American Women’s
Writing (2000), generally include only previously published materials, are
focused on theoretical perspectives, or are written chiefly by literary the-
orists. Our volume includes only new material written specifically for this
book by scholars and artists who work in a variety of disciplines and
media and who utilize interdisciplinary methods. Our collection explic-
itly develops the relation between (and challenges the binary of ) the the-
oretical and the practical as it illuminates theoretical revisions that emerge
from the cultural productions of women of color, and it accomplishes this
through works that emerge from a variety of cultural perspectives. Each
of the related works mentioned above fills gaps left open in the prior lit-
erature. They are highly recommended to those who wish to further pur-
sue themes raised here.
An original plan for the book called for its organization along the
lines of the kinds of arts or cultural productions under discussion, so,
for example, we planned a section on literature, one on performance art,
and others on visual and material arts. As we prepared our manuscript
for review and publication, however, we realized that our original
scheme was problematic. Virtually all of the artists discussed here work
in multiple media or in media that cannot be easily classified, and they
often challenged the very distinctions such an organizing principle
would utilize. It soon became clear that a different scheme for arrange-
ment would be more appropriate and perhaps more helpful to the
reader. Thus, we have grouped the essays here along the lines for four
broad themes: those developing a crucial precursor (and product) of aes-
thetic agency—imagination; those focused on issues relating to the
body, particularly as its morphological features provide the material for
both discrimination and recreation of meaning; those investigating the
connection between aesthetic productivity and the formation of new or
specific identities both personal and cultural; and those concerned with
issues of space and place, the transformation of the conditions in which
we live and our relations to geographic and spiritual domains. As writ-
ers in the first part argue, there are certain powers of imagination that
people must cultivate in order to be able to exercise the human form of
creativity that characterizes the production of culture and its reforma-
tion; there is, as Kelly Oliver describes, a kind of psychic space that
must be claimed in order to have the resources to imagine a different life
one would want to call one’s own. Aesthetic experience and imaginative
activity are bidirectional: aesthetic experience can ignite imaginative
activity, and the latter enhances and further facilitates the likelihood of
the former. This basic feature of aesthetic agency has immediate appli-
cations for the transfiguration of the body, its articulations in the pro-
ductions of dominant and oppressive cultures, and resistive practices
that form the basis for political action. Chapters in the second part of
the book specifically focus on this idea. The third part considers specific
formations of identity that are enabled by a remodeled sense of body
and spirituality, particularly as such are enabled through engagement in
aesthetic productivity in material, visual, and literary arts. The fourth
and final part considers the aesthetic dimension of relations to earth,
home, community, and nation as it relates to place making. The chap-
ters here consider aesthetic agency as a way of dwelling in a sense that
permeates ordinary lived experience and conditions the extraordinary
sense of connection to others. In many ways, each chapter addresses or
is relevant to each of these themes, too, although the present arrange-
ment allows grouped chapters to bring out more subtle commonalities
as well as differences and complementary perspectives.

Part One includes chapters that aim to articulate the kind of imagination
that is engaged in the process of creativity and how it bears on the devel-
opment of a kind of political imagination that is crucial for resistance.
Artists considered include Ana Castillo, Julia Alvarez, Ntozake Shange,
Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. Ritch Calvin’s chapter, “Writing the
Xicanista: Ana Castillo and the Articulation of Chicana Feminist Aes-
thetics,” provides a point of entry for the collection, since one of Calvin’s
claims is that Castillo endeavors to create a new discourse entirely—one
that is not preoccupied with the need for translation and thus operates on
its own terms—but that is concerned with communication, thus engaging
the norms and customs of formal discourse that predominate institutions
of power such as academia. Calvin persuasively argues that Castillo’s writ-
ing is misunderstood when viewed only as an example of the genre of
magical realism. The real magic of her works, as he describes them, lies in
her transformation of language, her reformation of identity, and her
development of prepatriarchal models for Xicanista ontology that are
deeply rooted in lived experience. Calvin intelligently describes the pecu-
liar position and dilemma of Xicanistas, who find the need to simultane-
ously resist colonial identities as well as the patriarchal elements of resis-
tance movements and who, nevertheless, as a legacy of colonialism, find
themselves at a considerable distance from indigenous models of world
making that might supply the cultural and creative resources for engaging
in such transformative resistance. As Calvin traces the strategies that
Castillo deploys throughout her vast body of writing, he particularly
notices how Castillo’s Xicanisma discourse incorporates as well as subverts
traditional Anglo discourse, including academic models. In this regard he
finds Castillo’s work distinctive. What emerges is a form of Xicanista sub-
jectivity that is defined in and on its own terms, but which is also inter-
active with other forms of subjectivity and alternative ways of structuring
and ordering experience. It also redefines the very terms of subjectivity,
shifting it away from an account of distinctive individual identity to one
that is first and foremost rooted in community and social relations.
Kelly Oliver, in “Everyday Revolutions, Shifting Power, and Femi-
nine Genius in Julia Alvarez’s Fiction,” focuses on the ways in which the
fault lines of oppressive power structures are reconfigured according to
race, class, and gender. She considers how gendered power in particular
can be manifest in the exploitation of tensions and cross-currents within
and among these structures by illuminating how Alvarez depicts scenes in
which we see, for example, “shifting power relations”: “class privilege has
given way to gender privilege, and then the relation between gender hier-
archy and class hierarchy is reversed again.” Oliver provides examples of

the ways in which one form of privilege can be played to undermine
another or turned against itself. Two other features of gendered power are
explored in Oliver’s essay, including the idea of the female genius, bor-
rowed from Julia Kristeva, and the significance of the everyday and ordi-
nary struggles that are faced by the characters in Alvarez’s novels.
Although the figure of the genius might appear to stand far apart from the
ordinary, Oliver shows how the characters in Alvarez’s volumes often show
themselves to be geniuses of the ordinary, “in which the very trappings of
femininity, womanhood, and motherhood can be used against patriarchal
values and institutions in order to open up a space for women’s resistance
to domination.” A particularly potent feature of Alvarez’s writing, as
Oliver describes it, is its exercise of imagination, which “enriches our own
sense of possibility and freedom.”
In the final section of her chapter, Oliver focuses on Alvarez’s novel
In the Name of Salomé, in which the main character battles depression and
struggles to recapture her creative imagination. Oliver focuses upon this
character to underscore the ways in which oppression can diminish the
capacities for sublimation and imaginative activity that are crucial for
women’s psychic lives and exercise of agency. This very problem is at the
center of Christa Davis Acampora’s “Authorizing Desire: Erotic Poetics
and the Aisthesis of Freedom in Morrison and Shange.” Instead of describ-
ing the problem in terms of sublimation, Acampora considers how
oppressive power structures diminish and redirect desire so as to cut one
off from both the resources to create and the imagination of free ends
toward which one might direct creative action. Acampora shares Oliver’s
interest in what constitutes psychic freedom and emphasizes how it is
predicated, at least in part, upon certain kinds of aesthetic experiences. In
pursuit of this thesis, Acampora draws on an existential framework to
elaborate how existential freedom is dependent upon opportunities for
creative activity, particularly in the production of meanings. She looks to
Frantz Fanon’s work to expose some problems with early existential views,
and to the choreopoetry of Ntozake Shange for further elaboration of the
particular situation faced by men and women of color and the potency of
aesthetic experiences for addressing these problems. Highlighting Audre
Lorde’s conception of erotic power, Acampora further underscores the
importance of the aesthetic basis of freedom in consideration of the defor-
mations of desire illustrated in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Part Two focuses on issues of embodiment and the transformation of the

meaning of the body through aesthetic creativity. Martha Mockus heads
her chapter, “MeShell Ndegéocello: Musical Articulations of Black Femi-
nism,” with an epigraph in which bassist/singer/songwriter Ndegéocello
emphasizes her sense of rhythm that is informed by the invisible materi-
ality of the body: “the pulses of the rivers of blood that flow through my
body.” This is how she describes her sense of the divine, her belief in
things that are not visible. Mockus’ chapter takes its cue from Ndegéo-
cello’s interest in “the epistemological power of music,” which is often
ignored in a culture that is driven primarily by the visual and literary.
Using what Mockus describes as an alternative and defiant “acoustic
logic,” Ndegéocello challenges her listeners to tap that unseen but felt
power in order to rethink and redefine what they believe they know about
freedom. This is further reflected in her lyrics addressing capitalism,
racism, sexism, and homophobia particularly in African American cul-
ture. Although Ndegéocello herself has resisted describing her work as
feminist—largely because she associates feminism with the interests of
white middle-class women—Mockus reveals how her compositional
process, her use of musical formations, and her lyrics are compatible and
in dialogue with feminist analyses along the lines of those advanced by
bell hooks and Angela Davis.
A different approach to transforming our sense of the visual and lit-
erary, particularly as it relates to representations of the body, is taken by
Kimberly Lamm in her “Portraits of the Past, Imagined Now: Reading the
Work of Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson.” Lamm describes how
both Simpson and Weems explore and exploit the “‘bizarre axiological
ground’” (determinations of value that ground meaning and significance),
borrowing a phrase from Hortense Spillers, from which the lives of
African American women and their families emerge. Lamm’s focus on
portraiture is significant, since the portrait is a good index of the histori-
cal axes of individuality, dignity, and respectability (particularly among
whites), which define and regulate norms of beauty and propriety and
thereby control or contain the (especially black) body. Portraiture is thus
a potent medium for resistance as well as a site against which resistance
must be mounted.
Weems’ and Simpson’s portraits of women also draw on their com-
plicated place in their homes, their immediate communities, and the
larger social order that presses upon and endeavors to define, regulate,
and control the other spheres. As mentioned near the outset of this intro-
duction, women of color face particular difficulties when endeavoring to
claim, craft, or create positive models for subjectivity from such a con-
siderable historical distance to models they might regard as legitimate
expressions of their own cultural traditions. Lamm does an especially
good job of elaborating the pitfalls of endeavoring to find such models
simply through reappropriation of what is cast as marginal or negative.
She helpfully describes how the works by Weems and Simpson depict—
offer a portrait of, that is, constitute a way of looking at—the lives of
women in ways that recognize their perceived status as marginal and
imagine an alternative set of values and norms in which their concerns
might be central.
A poignant mindfulness of the impact of being seen, the gaze, is
a central concern for Eduardo Mendieta in “The Coloniality of
Embodiment: Coco Fusco’s Postcolonial Genealogies and Semiotic
Agonistics.” Mendieta looks to the vast array of productions of Coco
Fusco to consider how she crafts a perspective that challenges and
undermines the colonizing and racializing gaze that endeavors to
make her “other.” He is especially interested in how Fusco accom-
plishes this sort of “looking back” through what he calls “semiotic
agonistics”—a deliberate and self-conscious entrée to the public
sphere that aims to destabilize and transform signifiers and the con-
struction of what is signified. Mendieta argues that Fusco engages this
struggle of meaning (that is “semiotic agonistics”) in body perfor-
mance, which contributes to and reconfigures the meaning of the
body itself and how the body serves as a creative site of meaning
(“somatic semiology”). For Mendieta, Fusco’s work exemplifies both
“performance of the body and the body in performance.”
Mendieta draws on a broad and somewhat unexpected range of the-
oretical perspectives in his analysis, including Heidegger’s conception of
“worlding” and Foucault’s conception of genealogy. He characterizes
Fusco’s work as “arting” the body, which is to say she quite consciously
highlights how bodies are bearers of meaningful signs and how they are
used in the transmission of culture, and she performs her body in ways
that trace, interrogate, and challenge the genealogies of producing colo-
nial and postcolonial subjectivities. Mendieta provides illuminating
examples of precisely how this is accomplished by Fusco, particularly in
his discussion of her performance work “Two Undiscovered Amerindi-
ans,” with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, to mark the five hundredth anniver-
sary of the “discovery” of the “New World.”

Mendieta’s chapter provides an excellent segue to part Three, which is

focused on the nature of agency and identity as they are produced
through artistic and aesthetic enterprises that take a variety of cultural
forms. The chapters in this section consider the remaking of self and the
making of agency not just in terms of disassembling or erasing but
rather as a practice that replaces the face of race with the pleasure and
joy of soul. They envision a truly creative enterprise that vivifies and
transforms rather than simply masks or re-masks. What is found here is
an effort to develop a poetics of soul and community that challenges the
self-contained individualism of most western, Enlightenment-based
cultures. Extreme individualism underwritten by late capitalism in these
cultures keeps us from recognizing our connections with others and the
natural world. Many Native American women writers critique this
ontology and express alternative visions of harmony and wholeness
between the individual, community, environment, and cosmos (Allen
1991). Ruth Porritt finds such a view in Pueblo Tewa cosmology and in
the contemporary sculpture of Roxanne Swentzell. Porritt’s “Pueblo
Sculptor Roxanne Swentzell: Forming a Wise, Generous, and Beautiful
‘I Am’” describes how Swentzell’s sculptures convey a sense of self as first
and foremost rooted in a community that complements an array of tal-
ents while nurturing and balancing a variety of needs. The agent as
emotional energy is also of concern to Swentzell, and she is particularly
interested in how the communal ties mentioned above can provide a
basis for healing and growth. Calling herself “a sculptor of human emo-
tions,” Swentzell endeavors to expand emotional capacities for expres-
sion and healing and to provide a sense of felt-form to augment our
more familiar senses of visual form. Her work is stirred by a deep recog-
nition of human suffering and responsibility and a candid exploration
of the role of sadness in our lives.
Drawing on the writings and works of Kay WalkingStick, Oscar
Howe, and Nancy Hartsock, Porritt argues that Swentzell’s works engage
what she describes as “standpoint emotional integrity.” Standpoint emo-
tional integrity, as Porritt defines it, draws on the concept of ‘standpoint
epistemology’ that is developed in the work of Hartsock (1983). Porritt
highlights both the cognitive and ethical character of the emotions in
standpoint theory as she describes “a sensitive individual’s perceptive con-
sciousness of intercultural and intracultural differences, particularly as
discrepancies in values or beliefs are carried by emotional recognitions.”
But this is not simply an exchange of empathy: standpoint emotional
integrity also clarifies and neutralizes aggressive and divisive intentions,
replacing them with “a strong sense of wonder and hope.” It involves the
agent in thoughtful and reflective creative action in which “the individual
manifests a talent for forming an undivided—if emotionally complex—
whole.” That practice of making whole provides a formal basis for com-
munity building and regenerative healing from the scarring effects of
racism and sexual discrimination. Porritt emphasizes the way in which
standpoint emotional integrity “is specifically embodied; the sensations
which signal our emotions arise out of our bodies as physical responses to
our experiences with other people and our environment.” Through analy-
sis of numerous illustrated examples Porritt describes precisely how
Swentzell brings this forth in her works.
Gaining a sense of community in the wake of colonialism and the
cultural discontinuity that stems from practices of forced migration and
cultural terrorism is addressed by Phoebe Farris in “The Syncretism of
Native American, Latin American, and African American Women’s Art:
Visual Expressions of Feminism, the Environment, Spirituality, and
Identity.” Farris describes the art-making activities of Native American,
African American, and Latin American women as practices of syn-
cretism. Syncretism involves utilizing and adapting various symbols and
traditions from both ancient and modern cultural practices, and it
allows these artists to explore possibilities for generating their own
norms and values in the context of the vast network of relations and
affiliations (both voluntary and otherwise) that characterize modern life
and their lived experiences. Of particular concern to those producing
syncretic works is a rejection of the strict notion, pressed from both
inside and outside their own cultures, to deploy “traditional” forms of
expression as the only way to be truly “authentic” or to realize some
essential kind of agency. Farris explicitly rejects this way of conceiving
authenticity and cites numerous ways in which it is directly challenged
by the women artists she studies: “Any insistence that Indian art remain
‘traditional’ as a way of preserving culture is a form of cultural discrim-
ination because cultures are dynamic, not static.” The artists Farris cites
draw upon the ideas and philosophical perspectives of a variety of com-
munities, including those organized around political movements found
in feminism and environmentalism, especially for their emphases on
human dignity, relational and communal agency, and the connections
between human beings and the places in which they live and from
which they draw their sustenance. Virtually all of these artists consider
art to have curative powers that can heal psyches, communities, and
intercommunal relations on a global scale. This art dissolves the
high/low distinction as it challenges the categories of the authentic and

naïve/traditional in pursuit of new forms of human expression in the
production of ethnic heritage. Farris reviews a stunning array of women
artists and vast collections of works to illustrate just how pervasive these
ideas are.
The roles and challenges of women in the context of broader liber-
ation movements are explored by Nandita Gupta in her “Dalit Women’s
Literature: A Sense of the Struggle.” In particular, Gupta focuses on the
distinctive character of the voices of women writers, how they depict the
aims of the movements of which they are a part, and the ways in which
women characters figure in their literary productions. A special feature of
this contribution is its use of materials that are difficult to acquire. Gupta
traces the development of agency in the writings of women throughout
the Dalit movement, and she underscores the difficulties of the tensions
between women of different castes.
The volume concludes with a group of chapters that explicitly
addresses a theme raised in the epigraph to this volume in which bell
hooks describes a house, more properly a “home,” that is a living space
that is shaped by and shapes within those who dwell there (the notion of
‘home’ stands in contrast with ‘house’ in the sense invoked in Audre
Lorde’s famous “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s
House” [1984]; compare a new sense of theoretical ‘house’ in Gordon
and Gordon 2006). Such practices of shaping that are found in the pro-
duction of that home are aesthetic. The home-making that organizes and
animates such an aesthetic instills what bells hooks describes as “a yearn-
ing for beauty,” which is “the predicament of the heart that makes our
passion real” (hooks 1990, 103). The chapters in this part of our volume
explore in a variety of ways the connections between place, particularly
the home or homeland, and a kind of yearning that draws one out of
oneself, that serves as the basis for a kind of ecstasy—or standing out—
from the ready-made personas created by the objectifying gaze of the
dominant culture. Such ecstasy is what makes the spaces in which we
find ourselves live, and in that living, our aspirations, wants, and
desires—our passion—is given direction, meaning, and purpose, which
makes it real.
The emotional charge of place and its role in shaping a sense of
community and cultural continuity are emphasized in Ailsa Smith’s
“The Role of ‘Place’ in New Zealand Ma\ori Songs of Lament,” which is
a fascinating study of Ma\ori songs of lament collected, recorded, and
written by her great-grandfather during the nineteenth century. These
songs are especially important for cultural recovery and identity forma-
tion for Smith herself, and for other Ma\ori peoples, since colonial inva-
sion resulted in a sense of dislocation among the self, the land, and lan-
guage. Smith explores the oral tradition’s role in helping to sustain some
sense of identity under colonialism. She considers the ways in which the
songs were used to convey and preserve tribal information, including
practical knowledge about food sources and environmental features. She
also reveals how their formal organization provides a rhythmic
mnemonic for ideas that shaped distinctive ways of thinking about
place, time, history, and community. Smith elaborates this in the con-
text of a discussion of wa\, which indicates the circumstances of an event
that emphasizes the interconnectivity and inseparability of people and
place in an ongoing and relational process. Women participated in the
composition of songs of lament, and Smith notices that such activities
provided powerful outlets for the assertion of agency and the acquisi-
tion of respect within the community. Since the Ma\ori community, par-
ticularly the Taranaki tribe, which is the focus of Smith’s investigation,
defined itself in terms whose significances were written in the landscape,
its fundamental concepts were particularly durable but also contingent
upon rights and access to the lands in which those meanings were
inscribed through song. Smith skillfully illuminates this in her discus-
sion of the historical example of the Treaty of Waitangi and how the
European presence in New Zealand, facilitated by Ma\ori acceptance of
that document, led to the loss of land that was so often the theme of the
songs of lament she studies.
Through an exploration of the complicated and fascinating history
of the development of the Harlem Experimental Theater in the basement
of the public library on 135th Street in Harlem, Katherine Wilson high-
lights the cultural production of spaces of knowledge and creativity in her
“Theater Near Us: Librarians, Culture, and Space in the Harlem Renais-
sance.” While works by and about black artists were featured in a variety
of theatrical venues during this time, as Wilson notes the productions
staged in the public library basement were among the first that repre-
sented the character of black experience both depicted and staged in the
places where African Americans actually lived. Instrumental in bringing
about this opportunity was the effort of Regina Andrews, whose story as
a woman of mixed racial ancestry striving to achieve professional success
and institutional reform is interesting in its own right. Entwined in this
history of giving the Harlem Experimental Theater its home is an analy-
sis of the library as the home of the space of knowledge, accessible to
women because of its association with “an extension of the (bourgeois)

home” in which “library discourses identified librarians literally as ‘host-
esses.’” Wilson’s chapter provides a fascinating example of the ways in
which social and cultural transformation is manifest in the unmaking and
remaking of public space.
The making of home and the recovery of the idea of homecoming
in Native American theater is thematized in the final contribution to the
volume, “Into the Sacred Circle, Out of the Melting Pot: Re/Locations
and Homecomings in Native Women’s Theater” by Jaye T. Darby. Darby
draws on the works of Paula Gunn Allen, a Laguna Pueblo/Sioux scholar
and writer, in her articulation of how homecomings are variously repre-
sented and achieved in the works of three modern women playwrights:
Marcie Rendon (White Earth Anishinabe), Diane Glancy (Cherokee),
and Daystar/Rosalie Jones (Pembina Chippewa). A variety of themes and
challenges are explored in their works, including the tensions between
urban life and traditional spirituality, the ways in which cultural narra-
tives that form oral histories can seem alien to younger generations more
comfortable with the modern vernacular; and how dance, song, and
story can form the basis for the restoration of cultural memory and social
transformation. Each play considered explores the liminal spaces lying
between the modern situation of cultural and geographic isolation and
dispossession and the promise of spiritual renewal in cultural making or
coming home.
This book admits of a variety of approaches to enjoying and appreciating

its contents. Those wishing to pursue the themes that characterize femi-
nist aesthetics generally—issues relating to imagination, the body, agency,
and place—might very well find that reading the book from beginning to
end gives them a helpful perspective on these broader issues, especially in
the context of thinking about how women of color particularly encounter
and approach them. Since most authors also discuss and/or draw upon
better known theoretical frameworks, including those generated by
women of color, a course that considers the cultural productions of
women of color as sites of resistance and social transformation might
fruitfully utilize this book alongside readings of important theorists, col-
lections of which are mentioned above. Still others might enjoy exploring
the specific works described and illustrated herein, deciding to pick and
choose among the chapters without concern for reading the them in any
particular order. Each chapter was written in order to open up a distinc-

tive perspective in its own right; each endeavors to illuminate and articu-
late a sense of the unmaking and remaking that taps the transformative
power of women’s aesthetic agency. Each reader is encouraged to engage
in an imaginative dialogue in order to make it her or his own.
Part I
Resisting Imagination
1
Writing the Xicanista
Ana Castillo and the Articulation

of Chicana Feminist Aesthetics
Ritch Calvin
What happens when we refuse learned associations, dualisms,

metaphors? We may begin to introduce unimaginable images
and concepts into our poetics.
—Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers
Of all the writers to whom Ana Castillo is compared, perhaps the most
frequent are Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and Chilean Isabel
Allende, arguably the two best-known proponents, or practitioners, of
“magical realism.” García Márquez’s Cien años de la soledad (One Hun-
dred Years of Solitude), which was originally published in 1967 and has
become synonymous with “magical realism,” contains the following pas-
sage, in which Remedios the Beauty ascends into the skies:
She had just finished saying [“I never felt better”] when Fernanda felt a del-
icate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide.
Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she
tried to grasp the sheets so that she would not fall down at the instant that
Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Úrsula, almost blind at the time, was
the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that
determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she
watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flap-
ping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of
beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in
the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the
upper atmosphere where not even the highest flying birds of memory
could reach her. (García Márquez 1970, 222–23)
21
Writing the Xicanista 23
In Isabel Allende’s first novel, La casa de los espíritus (The House of the
Spirits), which was first published in 1982 and has become synonymous
with “feminist magical realism,” Allende describes one of the daughters of
the Trueba family:
Her gaze rested on Rosa, the oldest of her living daughters, and, as always,
she was surprised. The girl’s strange beauty had a disturbing quality that
even she could not help noticing, for this child of hers seemed to have been
made of a different material from the rest of the human race. Even before
she was born, Nívea had known she was not of this world, because she had
already seen her in dreams. This was why she had not been surprised when
the midwife screamed as the child emerged. At birth Rosa was white and
smooth, without a wrinkle, like a porcelain doll, with green hair and yellow
eyes—the most beautiful creature to be born on earth since the days of orig-
inal sin, as the midwife put it, making the sign of the cross. (1985, 5–6)
Ana Castillo’s third novel, So Far from God, published in 1994, has
become synonymous with “Chicana magical realism.” It contains a pas-
sage that narrates the funeral service of the three-year-old Loca, during
which the child is “resurrected” and “ascends”:
The lid had pushed all the way open and the little girl inside sat up, just
as sweetly as if she had woken from a nap, rubbing her eyes and yawning.
“¿Mami?” she called, looking around and squinting her eyes against the
harsh light. Father Jerome got hold of himself and sprinkled holy water in
the direction of the child, but for the moment was too stunned to utter
so much as a word of prayer. Then, as if all this was not amazing enough,
as Father Jerome moved toward the child she lifted up into the air and
landed on the church roof. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!” she
warned. (1994, 22–23)
Each of these passages contains “characteristics” of “magical real-

ism,” which Patricia Hart defines as a narrative wherein the real and the
magical are juxtaposed; this juxtaposition is narrated matter-of-factly; the
apparently impossible event leads to a deeper truth that holds outside the
novel; conventional notions of time, place, matter, and identity are chal-
lenged; and the effect of reading the fiction may change the reader’s prej-
udices about what reality is (Hart 1989, 27). Furthermore, all three pas-
sages exhibit significant similarities in content: all three represent an
unusually beautiful female character; all three have some religious content
or allusions; and two of them represent an “ascension.”
Despite these apparent similarities of form and content, however,
Castillo has categorically denied any connection with magical realism:
24 RITCH CALVIN
“Someone always asks me about ‘magic realism.’ But people who know
see the sources for my ‘magic.’ Like in So Far from God—the women are
literally saints. I read The Dictionary of Saints as background
research. [. . .] ‘Magical realism’ is just another name for the imagination
of Latino Catholics” (Rose 2000). In other words, what we see here is an
example of critics attempting to read one author through a critical lens
developed for other writers, from different countries, from different cul-
tures, and with different aims. By simply noticing some superficial simi-
larities and then lumping these three texts together, I would contend, crit-
ics are misreading Castillo’s text. While magical realism developed as a
literary aesthetic within a particular cultural and political history, that
same aesthetic does not apply to So Far from God, despite superficial sim-
ilarities. Castillo, from her perspective, is not juxtaposing the magical
with the real. But rather, she is representing the real. Furthermore,
although Castillo has consequently come to be synonymous with Chicana
magical realism, the only place in which these apparent similarities exist
in any consistent degree is the novel So Far from God. Therefore, catego-
rizing Castillo by misreading the content of a single novel reduces her
work to a single characteristic and marginalizes it by placing it within an
“exotic” categorization. Furthermore, focusing on a higher profile charac-
teristic such as “magical realism” diverts attention from other more rele-
vant and more pressing aspects of this text, in particular, and of her body
of work, in general. Instead of imposing a critical framework developed
by and for other writers onto Castillo’s work, I propose examining
Castillo’s body of work in the terms of her philosophical articulation in
order to develop a model of interpretation of her work.
Castillo’s collections of poetry include Otro Canto (1977), The Invi-
tation (1979), Women Are Not Roses (1984), My Father Was a Toltec
(1988), My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems 1973–1988 (1995), and
I Ask the Impossible (1998). Her novels include the epistolary novel The
Mixquiahuala Letters (1986); the sprawling Sapogonia (1990); the Chi-
cana telenovela, So Far from God (1993); and her most recent novel, Peel
My Love Like an Onion (1999). Her single collection of short stories
appeared under the title Loverboys (1996), and her single collection of
critical essays was published as Massacre of the Dreamers (1992). In addi-
tion to her own work, Castillo cotranslated (with Norma Alarcón)
Anzaldúa and Moraga’s anthology This Bridge Called My Back under the
title Esta Puente, Mi Espalda (1988) and coedited (with Norma Alarcón
and Cherríe Moraga) a collection of essays entitled The Sexuality of Lati-
nas (1991). Finally, Castillo edited and introduced a collection of writings
by various Latinas and Latinos on the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe,

entitled Goddess of the Americas/La diosa de las Américas (1996).
Of the popular and critical attention Castillo has received, nearly all
of it has been directed at two texts: The Mixquiahuala Letters and So Far
from God. In fact, after a search through the MLA bibliography, one
might arrive at the conclusion that they are the only two books Castillo
ever wrote. While both of these novels are interesting, entertaining, and
provocative, they constitute only a fraction of her work. And while they
also exhibit many of the same concepts and tropes that appear elsewhere
in her work, those concepts and tropes are more fully developed through-
out her corpus. Criticism on Castillo’s writing has tended to focus on
“magical realism,” ethnography (Quintana 1991; Bennett 1996), border
writing (Yarbro-Bejarano 1992), religiosity (Delgadillo 1998), or sexual-
ity (Álvarez 1995; Alarcón 1989). While most of these examples are wor-
thy of detailed examination and are important elements of her writing,
they certainly do not exhaust the possibilities of her texts. Taken at a
macroscopic level, however, they all—with the exception of the analysis
of “magical realism”—contribute to Castillo’s articulation of Xicanisma
(which, according to Castillo, is a homophone of Chicanisma), or Chi-
cana feminism.
An important element of developing an aesthetic of Ana Castillo’s
Xicanisma is the level of discourse. Castillo is able to utilize and manipu-
late many types of discourse, including traditional (Anglo) academic dis-
course, something that another prominent Chicana writer, Gloria
Anzaldúa, refused to do. In Borderlands/La frontera, Anzaldúa’s most “aca-
demic” and “critical” work, she still avoids standard academic diction and
syntax. Her “prose” is filled with poetic turns of phrase, grammatical
errors, and multiple levels of diction, including poetic, familiar, and col-
loquial versions of several languages. In addition, her choice of material
to footnote (or not) is often ironic and intended to undermine the acad-
emic tradition. This stands in contrast with Massacre of the Dreamers in
which Castillo writes in a traditional academic discourse. She writes, for
example, “What phallocentric ego could imagine this suicidal strategy as
the basis of a religious ideology?” (1995a, 99). Furthermore, the essays
included in Massacre are more meticulously footnoted than are those in
Borderlands/La frontera, signaling, at the very least, a willingness to engage
Anglo academic culture on its own terms. As Castillo says in an interview
with Cinander and Finch, “because of the commitment that I have to
contributing to social change, I did the serious research and analysis that
academia demands” (Cinander and Finch 2000).
26 RITCH CALVIN
This position becomes something of a paradox for Castillo. While

attempting to negotiate a position for herself, and, by extension for Chi-
canas, within a liberal, academic discourse, Castillo suggests that leftists
and liberals are also often complicit in the oppression of “others” and that
they are unaware of the ways in which they have benefited from that
oppression. Meanwhile, mestizas and mestizos are advised and expected
to “assimilate” into mainstream culture, which Castillo insists is a form of
“genocide” (Castillo 1995a, 22). In an interview with Cynthia Rose,
Castillo states, “If Latina writers choose to embrace ‘white writing,’ then
we may well limit our perceptions” (Rose 1996). In other words, the very
language that Chicanas are compelled to adopt in order to participate in
liberal, academic discourse contributes to their disappearance. And for
creative writers, the adoption of Anglo standards of literature is, similarly,
an element of the annihilation of Chicana literature. The alternative
would be to develop and foster standards that are products of the cul-
ture—or, in other words, an autochthonous discourse and an autochtho-
nous feminism.
However, the simple rejection of hegemonic language and standards
has its own consequences. In the short story “Being Indian, a Candle
Flame and So Many Dying Stars,” Castillo writes, “‘It is moments like
this, watching that story about the Chamulas, that I know that I am
Indian,’ I said in my own language and not in this one that I am speak-
ing to you now because if I don’t, like the Chamulas, my story will be
annihilated and not heard” (1996, 96). And to silence so “annihilated ” is
another form of genocide. So, in her academic writing, Ana Castillo
adopts a traditional (Anglo, masculine) discourse in order to be heard, in
order to re-vision institutions of machismo and patriarchy, and in order
to have that revision read and considered. However, in her short stories
and novels, Castillo maintains an autochthonous Chicana discourse and
aesthetic.
Castillo’s theory and feminist goals appear most explicitly in her
collection of essays, Massacre of the Dreamers. Through this series of
interconnected and occasionally overlapping essays, Castillo attempts to
establish a historical, philosophical, and religious/spiritual foundation
for her feminist practice. By then examining her novels, short stories,
and critical essays, that is, through examining her practice of her writing,
we can further articulaate her theoretical model of a localized or
autochthonous feminism. As we will see, Castillo demonstrates a great
deal of theoretical and philosophical consistency over the course of her
career and across the various types of writing. In other words, the themes
she develops in her (academic) critical essays are also expressed in her
(creative) short stories and her novels.
In developing a model of autochthonous feminism, like Anzaldúa,
Castillo situates herself and her writing in relation to two movements:
Anglo feminism and El Movimiento (the Chicano movement). And like
Anzaldúa, she attempts to distance herself from both of these movements.
As for the former, she argues that Anglo feminism had very little influence
on her. As a Chicana growing up in the barrios of Chicago, her existence
was informed by working-class Chicano culture and not middle-class
Anglo culture. “I had no idea what white feminists were thinking of in
spheres far from my life in those asphalt, slush-covered streets of working
class Chicago” (Castillo 1995a, 122). In fact, Castillo grew up thinking of
herself as a Mexican, even though she was born in Chicago and did not
visit Mexico until she was ten years old (Castillo 1995a, 24). Further-
more, in Massacre of the Dreamers, she argues that contemporary feminist
writing, among which she includes such contemporary standards as Susan
Faludi’s Backlash (1991), Naomi Wolf ’s Beauty Myth (1991), and Camille
Paglia’s Sexual Personae (1990), is centered on Anglo perspectives (Castillo
1995a, 1–2). Consequently, Castillo attempts an articulation of feminism
that is not Anglocentric.
Just as Castillo positions herself in relation to Anglo feminism, she
spends even more time and energy positioning herself in relation to El
Movimiento, if only because it has had a larger and more direct impact on
her own life. In her analysis of the antiwoman and antifeminist bias
within El Movimiento, she explores the two “doctrines” or ideologies that
structure it: Marxism and Catholicism (Castillo 1995a, 85). Castillo
argues that the Chicana feminist and Xicanisma cannot merge the doc-
trines of feminism and Marxism because, for one thing, a Chicana activist
is not necessarily a feminist, and, for another, the social stigma attached
to “socialism” and “communism” causes Chicana activists to shy away
from the ideology (1995a, 85). Simultaneously, Catholicism has had a
profound impact on El Movimiento and those involved in it. Castillo
argues that the historical longevity of Catholicism (relative to Marxism)
gives Catholicism greater claims over people’s lives and social structures.
In fact, for Castillo, “Catholicism is synonymous with Mexican society”
(Castillo 1995a, 86). However, since El Movimiento was engaged in a
struggle with the government for civil rights, it was represented as anti-
democratic, and therefore, communistic.
Castillo argues, then, that the exclusion of the feminine principle
within Marxism and Catholicism prohibits women from fully participating
28 RITCH CALVIN
in Chicano society and El Movimiento. “More precisely, omission of the

feminine principle in society prohibits true social transformation” (Castillo
1995a, 87). So, if society, Marxism, and Catholicism—and by extension, El
Movimiento—are all informed by a masculinist perspective, Xicanisma and
Xicanistas need to turn elsewhere for inspiration and guidance. “By recall-
ing the long forgotten ways of our Amerindian heritage, we will be led back
to a view that all things created in the universe are sacred and equal”
(Castillo 1995a, 87).
Xicanistas, however, find themselves in a dilemma. While Anglo
feminists draw on the myths, religions, and traditions of Europe and feel
both comfortable and entitled to do so, the Xicanista feels less comfort-
able and less entitled to look to the myths, religions, and traditions of her
Mexic Amerindian ancestors because she is so far removed from that soci-
ety and because she is also likely to consider herself Christian/Catholic.
Since Anglo society and Christian doctrine have long urged her to reject
her indigenous roots, practices, and identity (Castillo 1995a, 87), the
Xicanista often finds herself in between her political consciousness and
her society (religion and family) (Castillo 1995a, 89).
Castillo argues for a return, then, to prepatriarchal models and
examples. Despite the fact that a “conservative viewpoint” argues that
matriarchal societies did not exist, she argues that they did exist and that
they can serve as an example for an autochthonous feminism and for a
nonpatriarchal society. “For too long we have been told what we are and
why we are as women: mujeres mestizas (sino descendientes de sangre
Europea, somos indias sin razón), católicas (sino ahora protestantes o
pecadoras), definitions embedded in a history that has subordinated the
female gender [sic]” (Castillo 1995a, 104). However, unlike Anzaldúa,
whose work conveys a kind of optimism and, at times, uncritical accep-
tance of prepatriarchal models, Castillo is less sanguine about access to
such models because of the pervasiveness of patriarchy in Anglo and Mex-
ican societies.
For Castillo, then, the Xicanista response develops “in the acknowl-
edgement of the historical crossroad where the creative power of woman
became deliberately appropriated by the male society. And woman in the
flesh, thereafter, was subordinated. It is our task as Xicanistas, to not only
reclaim our indigenismo—but also to reinsert the forsaken feminine into
our consciousness” (Castillo 1995a, 12; cf. also 189). The key for Castillo
is the transition from celebrating the feminine creative spirit and body to
a masculine creative power that resides in the intellect and not the body.
“Spirituality is an acutely personalized experience inherent in our on-
going existences. Throughout history, the further man moved away from
his connections with woman as creatrix, the more spirituality was also dis-
connected from the human body” (Castillo 1995a, 13). In other words,
for Ana Castillo, the telos for the Xicanista is reintegration of the femi-
nine, the creative, and the spiritual into society, and the model for such a
society exists in the prepatriarchal societies of the pre-Aztec Mexic
Amerindians.
Ana Castillo’s first large work of fiction was the epistolary novel The
Mixquiahuala Letters, which narrates the travels and relationships of two
women, Teresa and Alicia, through Teresa’s letters to Alicia. Since the
novel develops solely from Teresa’s perspective, she acknowledges that
they are partial and biased and that they may not reflect Alicia’s percep-
tions of their history together. As Letter Sixteen begins, “i doubt if what
i’m going to recall for both our sakes in the following pages will coincide
one hundred percent with your recollections” (Castillo 1986, 53). Fur-
thermore, the letters are not a strictly chronological narrative of their
“adventures.” Instead, Castillo presents the reader with a number of
choices about how to approach reading the letters/novel. The table of
contents reads, “Dear Reader: It is the author’s duty to alert the reader
that this is not a book to be read in the usual sequence. All letters are
numbered to aid in following any one of the author’s proposed options.”
What follow are three proposed schemes for reading the letters: “For the
Conformist,” “For the Cynic,” “For the Quixotic.” Each of the three pro-
posals lists a series of numbers corresponding to the forty letters that con-
stitute the novel and suggests which letters to read and which to omit and
the order in which they should be read. Finally, she writes, “For the reader
committed to nothing but short fiction, all the letters read as separate
entities.”
Nevertheless, the question of structure remains. If Castillo neither
deliberately employed nor parodied the structure of “Boom” writer
Cortázar, then why employ the fractured and nonunitary narrative struc-
ture? One of Castillo’s stated objectives was to include poetic elements in
a novelistic form; for the poet Castillo, the rigidity of the novel form was
limiting. Furthermore, Castillo contends that playing with language is an
important aspect of her cultural and familial background. The narrative
structure, however, has two other effects. For one, it actively draws the
reader into the reading process, foregrounding the fact that meaning is also
produced in the act of reading. In this, Castillo falls within a tradition of
“experimental” writers, like those of the Latin American “Boom” and the
French nouveau roman, and of cultural theorists such as Roland Barthes.
30 RITCH CALVIN
Perhaps more important, the fragmented and nonunitary structure of her

novel formally thematizes a nonunitary subjectivity of the Chicana.
While Chicano artists such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña have repre-
sented the ways in which Chicano subjectivity fragments in Anglo soci-
ety, Castillo represents the effects of a patriarchal, Anglo society on a
specifically Chicana subjectivity. As Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano writes, “In
Castillo’s writing Chicanas struggle to understand themselves in relation
to what Alarcón calls a ‘multiplicity of others’—the individual women
and men of their culture and of other cultures as well as entire racial, class
and cultural groups” (1992, 66). In part, then, The Mixquiahuala Letters
becomes the performance of Gloria Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of a bor-
derlands subjectivity. As Yarbro-Bejarano points out, Teresa exists in the
space among numerous cultures and crosses several national borders. Fur-
thermore, Teresa exists in the borderlands of race, class, and sexuality, all
of which separate her from Alicia and prevent “the establishment of real
intimacy between the two women” (1992, 67). And rather than rejecting
such a fragmentary identity, the novel validates it by refusing to accept
any single reading. Instead, the reader can chose or reject any of the pos-
sible readings offered by the author, which leaves Castillo in a quandary.
On the one hand, the novel’s content argues that patriarchal society
threatens and limits possibilities for Teresa and Alicia and that the
racial/ethnic rift prevents the two women from connecting in a more
meaningful way. On the other hand, the novel’s form accepts the frag-
mentation of subjectivity, arguing instead for a nonhegemonic, nonpatri-
archal model of reading.
In other words, one of Castillo’s aims is to articulate and explore
nonhegemonic and prepatriarchal modes of representation. Here, Teresa
and Alicia enact Castillo’s philosophical search for prepatriarchal models
of human relations in Mexico. Indeed, Teresa and Alicia encounter some
of the same obstacles that Ana Castillo encountered in her own search for
those models in Mexico: “Unfortunately the writings of mestizos, criollos,
Spaniards, and Anglos from the nineteenth century up to [1979] did not
reveal anything more than stereotypes. At best I found ethnographic data
that did not bring me closer to understanding how the Mexic Amerindian
woman truly perceives herself ” (Castillo 1995a, 7).
Castillo’s second novel, Sapogonia, raises some of the same theoreti-
cal arguments. While the narrative of Sapogonia revolves around three pri-
mary characters, the central character, Máximo Madrigal, leaves his fam-
ily and homeland of Sapogonia to “conquer” new territory in the United
States. Sapogonia is Castillo’s only work to feature a male protagonist.
Máximo becomes involved with the singer/songwriter Pastora Velásquez

Aké, although she refuses to be conquered by Máximo; Pastora is involved
with Perla, although the two women, like Teresa and Alicia, are never able
to establish “real intimacy.”
In order to thematize the distancing and fragmenting effects of cul-
ture on identity, Castillo again employs a nontraditional narrative struc-
ture, specifically through multiple narrative voices. Although the use of
multiple viewpoints is not necessarily novel, either, Castillo’s combination
of first-person, second-person, and third-person narrators is relatively
uncommon (though see, for example, Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of
Artemio Cruz). Close reading of the novel reveals that there are actually
several third-person narrators, none of whom is necessarily reliable. Writ-
ers such as James Joyce have also employed nontraditional narrative struc-
tures, and Joyce also uses the narrative technique to signal a destabiliza-
tion of personal, ethnic, and national identity. His use of the narrative
strategy, however, derives from the specificity of the modernization of
Great Britain and Europe and the relationship between England and Ire-
land, among other things. For Ana Castillo, Elsa Saeta concludes, “The
structure and narrative strategy of the novel thus serve to reinforce one of
the novel’s major themes: the tenuous relationship between the real and
the unreal, between reality and illusion, between historical fact and nar-
rative fiction” (1994, 71).
While the narrative strategy undermines the reliability of the
reader’s perceptions, Castillo also attempts to draw the reader into the
process, just as she does in The Mixquiahuala Letters. As an epigraph,
Castillo writes, “This is the story of make-believe people in a real world;
or, if you like, the story of real people in a make-believe world.” Through
this literary device, Castillo invites the reader to question the relationship
between the characters and reality. If the characters are fictional but the
world is real, then Perla and Pastora’s inability to establish “real intimacy”
and the kinds of violence enacted upon Pastora are a part of our world. If
the characters are real but the world is fictional, then there are, in fact,
two women who have not been able to establish “real intimacy” and a
woman who has been murdered by a man who cannot break her.
Furthermore, Castillo ruptures the narrative through discontinuities
in the chronology. While much of the novel progresses chronologically,
the novel also introduces multiple chronological shifts. For example, the
very first chapter occurs at the very end of the narrative chronology, and,
in fact, the characters and circumstances involved in Chapter One do not
become clear until the very end. The narrative uncertainty of the opening
32 RITCH CALVIN
chapter signals the narrative instability and unreliability to the reader.

Máximo’s frequent references to his dreams further undermine the narra-
tive stability. In Chapter Two, the third-person narrator says, “All my life
has been divided into two realities: dreams of revelation and prophecy,
and those dreams that manifest my present” (Castillo 1990, 11). The
effect is that the reader does not know whether the narrative being read is
a dream, a reality, or a prophecy of things to come. In both The Mix-
quiahuala Letters and Sapogonia, then, the fragmentation of the narrative
coincides with the fragmentation of Chicanas in society and culminates
with the murder of one of the female protagonists.
In her third novel, So Far from God, Castillo once again employs
various narrative strategies in order to represent formally the destabiliza-
tion of patriarchal forms. So Far from God narrates the lives of five
women, Sofía and her four daughters, La Loca, Caridad, Fe, and Esper-
anza, although various boyfriends, fiancés, stalkers, and husbands float in
and out of the text, as well. In weaving together the narratives of these five
women, Castillo draws upon numerous genres, including allegory, reli-
gious texts, folk tales, dichos [“maxims”], telenovelas [“soap operas”], and
cookbooks. As all five women find themselves in the borderlands among
various religions, cultures, men, and languages, they are all too often the
victims of neglect or abuse.
On the one hand, the novel assumes characteristics of an allegory.
Castillo models her female protagonists on women in The Dictionary of
Saints, and the names of the characters only serve to accentuate their alle-
gorical status: the mother Sofía (Wisdom), the eldest daughter Esperanza
(Hope), the daughters Fe (Faith) and Caridad (Charity), and the
youngest, La Loca (the Crazy One). In addition, Doña Felicia (Lady of
Happiness) and Esmeralda (Emerald—who is natural, nurturing, and
feminine, much like the earth to which she will return)—figure promi-
nently in the novel. Castillo’s aim here is to undermine narrative forms by
subverting the allegory and by turning these stereotypical feminine roles
on their heads. The Faith, Hope, and Charity of the three oldest daugh-
ters have traditionally characterized “good” women in Mexican culture,
and the Madness of the youngest daughter has traditionally characterized
“irrational” women. Castillo, then offers a subversion of traditionally
accepted Christian, Mexican values. Despite being the holders of positive
cultural values, Fe, Esperanza, and Caridad all meet unfortunate ends.
But Castillo offers La Loca, the holder of negative cultural values, as a
positive model. Only she embodies the values of community, and only
she remains connected to the values and members of the community.
In employing multiple hegemonic forms, Castillo subverts them by

defying the reader’s expectations of the form or by transforming them
into something “other.” For example, the traditional form of a religious
pilgrimage, here in the form of the annual trek to Esquipúlas, ends, not
in a renewal of faith in Jesus but, instead, in an encounter between two
women. Their meeting resembles the traditional tale of Juan Diego who
first encounters the Virgin of Guadalupe on the hillside. As Castillo sug-
gests: “Obviously, one does not only undermine the status quo by stating
it, but you undermine it by virtue of the language that you’ve chosen to
write in, and by your acts. [. . .] My language is not white standard Eng-
lish. It doesn’t matter if you claim to be Chinese American or Mexican
American or African American and put in all the familiar cultural motifs
if you’re still using the language that is acceptable by the status quo. And
I’ve not done that” (Saeta 1997, 141). So, apart from subverting the “sta-
tus quo” of the allegory, Castillo also subverts received literary traditions
through her use of language. For one, Castillo argues that her language is
an important element: “If my novel was instead written in White stan-
dard English, I’m doing nothing more than writing a White standard
novel with an ethnic motif ” (Romero). Consequently, Castillo writes So
Far from God using a regional dialect, which includes Spanish words and
phrases that are rarely translated and turns of phrase that are peculiar to
New Mexico, such as multiple double negatives. For Castillo, then, both
the content and the language must reflect a Chicana consciousness, which
undermines and revises received, patriarchal literary traditions. In this
regard, Castillo is even more radical than someone like Gloria Anzaldúa.
Although Anzaldúa makes liberal use of Spanish (in its many forms)
throughout Borderlands/La frontera, she almost always translates the Span-
ish into English, providing access to nonnative speakers. Conversely,
Castillo rarely translates any Spanish into English, leaving the nonnative
speaker of Spanish either to participate actively by learning Spanish or to
be left in the dark.
Thematically, the protagonists in all three of these novels find them-
selves confronted with, threatened by, and generally oppressed by Anglo
and Mexican patriarchy. Many of the characters are oppressed by various
manifestations of Anglo patriarchy, and they struggle with the means to
escape, or at least withstand their oppression. Sometimes, they are
oppressed by Chicanos within the Anglo culture, and within El
Movimiento, in particular. In order to combat, or subvert, these patriar-
chal forces, Castillo’s characters often seek a prepatriarchal model. How-
ever, the combination of oppressive elements overwhelms the characters,
34 RITCH CALVIN
leaving them wondering where or how to begin their struggle. If they

reject Anglo patriarchy and turn toward Mexican culture, they are often
confronted by a Mexican patriarchy that can be every bit as oppressive
and threatening. For example, in The Mixquiahuala Letters, in order to
escape an Anglo patriarchy, Teresa joins the Chicanos and El Movimiento.
However, such a move brings its own frustrations. As Teresa writes,
The eloquent scholars with their Berkeley Stanford
seals of approval
all prepped to change society articulate the
social deprivation of the barrio
starting with an
Anglo wife, handsome house, and a Datsun 280Z in the driveway
they were our new brothers. (Castillo 1986, 43)
If Anglo culture is unacceptable, and if Chicanos are unacceptable,
then another alternative might be a Mexican man. However, in Letter Six-
teen Teresa struggles with her relationship with Alvaro Pérez Pérez, a
Mexican living in the United States. They meet in Mexico, while he is
home with his family. Alvaro obviously courts her, introduces her to his
family, and attempts to seduce her, and Teresa finds him difficult to resist.
“This was a woman conditioned to accept a man about whom she has
serious doubts concerning his legitimate status with the human race”
(Castillo 1986, 54). When Teresa spurns his sexual advances, he leaves in
a rage, only to return later in a drunken state, leaving Teresa and Alicia
both afraid of him. “We, like a pair of dogs, huddled at the foot of the
bed” (58). Or, when she writes, “Saved you again? Like the night when we
escaped gang rape at that university auditorium or earlier that night,
when searching for you, i drove up with Jesús to that pitched black lover’s
hide-away at a pier and you jumped out of Eric’s car where he threatened
to take you at the point of a gun” (92). It seems, then, that the journey to
Mexico has not provided the answer for which they were looking.
Unlike the slender volume, The Mixquiahuala Letters, Sapogonia
sprawls over three continents and several lives. Like its predecessor,
Sapogonia features two female characters who struggle against the men
and masculine institutions in their lives. The male protagonist, Máximo
Madrigal, an egocentric and misogynistic man, emigrates from the fic-
tional country Sapogonia to the United States. Máximo callously rapes a
young local girl in Sapogonia. “I hardly knew why I took that girl by
force. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t have had any other girl that I wanted with-
out a struggle” (13). When he is told that he will marry Marisela, his
grandmother says: “aunque en este caso, tal vez sería preferible si te muri-
eras” (“although, in this case, perhaps it would be better if you were
dead”) (14). However, Marisela metaphorically emasculates Máximo. The
first time they have sex, she wipes away the semen as if in disgust. When
Máximo asks if she enjoyed making love, she replies, “‘Your friend is
much better than you’” (14). In his rage, Máximo nearly kills her and
decides to leave Sapogonia that night. In Paris, he believes he may have
gotten a young woman, Catherine, pregnant but does not demonstrate
the least remorse or concern for her life. In New York City, he begins a
sexual relationship with Hilda Gálvez, only to cast her aside for the more
attractive La China. In Chicago, he forces himself upon a young Polish
woman, Josephine—whom he finds disgusting—on the very same day he
meets his wife-to-be, Laura Jefferson, a wealthy woman with connections
in the art world. He cannot, however, maintain his relationship with
Laura because he feels emasculated by her wealth and influence. In order
to ameliorate his feelings of emasculation, Máximo must break her con-
trol and take her by force. At the moment when she finally submits, he
says, “‘Marry me’” (158). Even then, it is not a question, but rather an
imperative. Despite conquering and marrying Laura, he has numerous
sexual liaisons with other women. Finally, he deliberately seduces Maritza
Marín-Levy, who is affianced to Chicago’s first Chicano mayoral candi-
date, Alan García.
One of those women with whom Máximo has a sexual relationship
is Pastora Velásquez Aké, a singer, songwriter, musician who sings only
protest songs. When Máximo first encounters Pastora, he finds her phys-
ical beauty frustrating because he cannot dominate her in the ways he has
dominated and broken every other woman he has known. He is “both-
ered” by the way that Pastora will not surrender herself to him (Castillo
1990, 127). When she walks out of his studio on his first crude attempt
to seduce her, he writes, “She didn’t know what that kind of rejection did
to a man. [. . .] It was hard on a man to be told so unabashedly that he
wasn’t appealing” (132). As he reflects on how Pastora dominates him, he
writes of himself, “You’re a selfish wimp, no more willful than that kind
of pussy-whipped husband with a yoke about his neck that you detest so
much as to laugh aloud in the poor sucker’s face. [. . .] Admit it, Máximo
Madrigal, Pastora Velásquez Aké has you by the balls, los puros
huevos. [. . .] Face it. Max, she’s got you whipped” (172). Perhaps what
galls Máximo the most is that “[s]he wasn’t insecure enough to worry
about the faithless lover. She did as she damn well pleased” (173–74). Her
autonomy in the face of his dependence is more than he can bear. The
36 RITCH CALVIN
final chapter makes clear what begins in Chapter One. While awaiting
Maritza’s return from Brazil, Máximo pays another visit to Pastora, and
they make love repeatedly. When he awakens from sleep, he discovers that
he is with Pastora in an unfamiliar room, one that is filled with domestic
touches—which is wholly uncharacteristic of Pastora. Máximo picks up a
pair of scissors from the sewing table and approaches the bed.
In one thrust his clenched fist holding the scissors from her sewing table
comes down to pierce the hollow spot between the lumps of nippled flesh.
Her eyes open and are on him. Her face is wild as she inhales with the
thrust and exhales when he pulls the scissors out.
His hands are wet and drip red,
he wipes the sweat from his brow
mixed with tears. ¿Estás muerta ya, puta? (8–9)
However, the reader remains uncertain about whether the murder

occurs or not. The epilogue represents a happy and domestic Pastora with
her husband, Eduardo, and their son. Unlike the preceding 307 pages,
Pastora narrates, and she says, “Life goes on, Máximo Madrigal.” Was
chapter 59 a fantasy or reality? Was it one of Máximo’s dreams? And if a
dream, was it a dream of prophecy? In either event, the brutal murder of
the woman who possessed him represents his murderous intent in the face
of Pastora’s autonomy and unwillingness to be broken by her lover.
Although the artist Máximo Madrigal appears to be the central
character, the singer Pastora Velásquez Aké also plays a pivotal role. In the
beginning of the novel, Pastora lives above Perla and her two roommates,
Jesús and Francisco. Perla is a mother with twin sons. Her family holds
against her the fact that she never married. When Perla discovers that her
boyfriend has another woman, Perla physically attacks them both in a
cafeteria. Pastora invites Perla over to comfort her, and the two begin a
strong, supportive relationship. Because the two women begin living
together and openly support one another, many assume that they are les-
bians (25). “During their first months together they were not too unlike
a pair of newlyweds, blissful within the tight cocoon they had woven for
themselves” (69). A friend, Fabiola, tries to discover whether or not they
are lovers. “The only factor that Fabiola could tell was not in the rela-
tionship was sex. Everything else was obvious: companionship, financial
interdependency, as well as individual independence” (70).
The two grow apart, eventually, in no small part because of Máximo
and his obsession with Pastora. Perla, who has her own intense and inti-
mate feelings for Pastora, envies Pastora’s obsessive lover and decides to
find a man who will be obsessed with her. Perla eventually marries a mate-
rialist Anglo, and Perla fully assimilates into a materialist lifestyle, substi-
tuting a relationship with money for her relationship with Pastora. Pas-
tora regrets losing Perla; Máximo, the cause of their estrangement,
however, remains.
Chapter Nine of Massacre of the Dreamers, “Toward the Mother-
Bond Principle,” attempts to explain the possibilities of the relationship
between Pastora and Perla, a relationship that Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
calls “homosocial bonding” and Adrienne Rich calls the “lesbian contin-
uum.” In Mexican and Chicano culture, the special friend may well be a
“comadre.” “[C]omadres may be a splendid source for companionship,
spiritual uplifting, positive affirmation. By comadre I am not limiting the
definition to solely the woman who has baptized our child or vice versa,
but to mean close friend” (Castillo 1995a, 191). However, in Sapogonia
and The Mixquiahuala Letters, Castillo seems to argue that the presence
and intervention of men prevents the formation of comadres, of female
intimacy.
Because Pastora is a strong woman who is also spiritual, Máximo
often calls her a witch and equates her with the pagan goddess, Coatlicue.
When Máximo calls Pastora a witch, she responds that “Latino men
always thought that a woman who allowed herself to be thought of sexu-
ally and denied any reason to feel shameful of it and had none of the inhi-
bitions or insecurities with relation to commitments as it was considered
a woman should—had to be a witch” (Castillo 1990, 125). He also belit-
tles her devotion to the spiritual world, calling her a weak-willed woman
for her “common” “weakness” (159). However, Pastora continues to pray:
“To Santa Clara, she relayed the precariousness of her recent behavior. She
had been too frivolous and materialistic. Santa Clara had no objections to
material gain, but Pastora had forsaken those guides who watched out for
her welfare for the sake of tentative things” (164).
In Pastora, Castillo develops a strong Chicana who refuses to be
dominated by men or by their institutions. She refuses to accept the mate-
rialism of Anglo society and the values and practices of that society that
have produced injustice and oppression. At the Colloquium of U.S. Lati-
nos with the newly elected Chicano Mayor García, Pastora calls for child-
care reform for working-class women and men. However, when both the
mayor and his associate, Maritza Marín-Levy, dismiss her pleas, she rejects
liberal reforms. In other words, she understands that “the master’s tools
will never dismantle the master’s house.” Or, as Pastora says, “‘I’ll be
damned if I can understand why [Chicanas are] so determined lately to
38 RITCH CALVIN
emulate the values of the white people in this city who created the prob-
lems we have to begin with!’” (281). For Pastora, no patriarchal, liberal,
reformist model will suffice.
So Far from God differs from The Mixquiahuala Letters and Sapogo-
nia in that the characters do not necessarily go anywhere; nevertheless,
they all find themselves in a different place. In the opening chapter, La
Loca “dies” at the age of three, but is “resurrected” days later, during her
funeral. From that moment on, she shuns all human contact, except with
her mother, and prefers the contact of animals. Following her miraculous
resurrection, La Loca turns her back on the Church and Father Jerome.
As Theresa Delgadillo argues, “This striking scene suggests that Castillo
is engaged in revisionism on a small scale, substituting a Chicana resur-
rection for Christ’s resurrection, and accordingly creating an alternate
religious history or perhaps a new myth” (1998, 895–96). In other words,
La Loca rejects the patriarchal institution of the Catholic Church and its
masculine representatives. The resurrected Loca remains psychically and
spiritually connected to her sisters. La Loca “cures” her sister Caridad fol-
lowing her brutal rape and mutilation; she speaks to her sister Esperanza
while she is “lost” in Saudi Arabia and the army cannot locate her. By
rejecting patriarchal culture and the Church, La Loca establishes power-
ful and otherworldly connections to the other women in her family.
The fourth sister, Esperanza, also escapes from patriarchal culture
into another space. Esperanza, the oldest of the daughters, attended col-
lege (and earned a BA in Chicano studies), where she met numerous men,
had some affairs, and went through a Chicano activist stage. However,
Esperanza realizes that there is no place for her within El Movimiento.
Eventually realizing that her Chicano-activist boyfriend, Rubén, uses her,
she becomes a journalist, moves to Houston and then goes to Saudi Ara-
bia, where she “disappears.” After La Llorona informs La Loca that Esper-
anza “is died,” Esperanza makes frequent appearances. She appears near
the river, lays down with her mother, and discusses the U.S. war policy in
the Middle East with Caridad.
Ana Tomek suggests that while feminists might expect that Esper-
anza would be redeemed, if not fulfilled, through her attainment of her
high-profile, Anglo career, Castillo rejects such values. “Esperanza feels
that her search for career success will bring meaning to her life; instead it
brings only death” (Tomek). She further suggests that, for Castillo, the
importance of Esperanza as a La Llorona figure is her reintegration into
the family unit, which she had left for her career. “[P]erhaps Castillo
wants us to feel that Esperanza has triumphed in her reconciliation with
the family she left behind. She is not ‘just dead’ as is her sister Fe later on;
she lives on in a truly intangible (perhaps liberated?) form” (Tomek).
Once again, as in the case of Fe, Esperanza’s assimilation into the patriar-
chal values of the materialist Anglo world, and the simultaneous rejection
of Chicano values and a Chicano family, brings death. Although noncor-
poreal, Esperanza rejoins the family.
For Castillo, Fe represents what happens to those who whole-heart-
edly accept Anglo values. Fe (a.k.a. “la Gritona” [the Screamer]) had the
perfect life, working in a bank and engaged to be married. However, Fe’s
fiancé jilts her, and she responds by screaming for weeks. When she finally
stops screaming, her voice has suffered permanent damage, and no one can
understand her. She eventually marries her first cousin, Casimiro de
Nambe. After the wedding, Fe leaves her job at the bank because the man-
agement did not like her “handicap” (her speech impediment) and because
she and her husband want more money. At this point, Fe begins to express
her dissatisfaction with her family and her culture, and she begins to dis-
tance herself (physically and emotionally) from both of them. Instead, she
goes to work at a local factory, which pays large bonuses, and she and her
husband begin to accumulate all the material goods they had ever wanted.
For Fe, however, the cost of abandoning her family and culture—of accul-
turating into Anglo materialism—is sickness and death. The management
of the factory uses toxic chemicals without fairly notifying its employees,
and Fe contracts cancer and dies only a year after her wedding.
Like her sisters, Caridad rejects patriarchal culture. Initially, Caridad
works in the hospital. She likes to frequent bars and pick up men. Even-
tually she gets pregnant by Memo but has an abortion with the help of La
Loca. One night she is found badly beaten, her breasts bitten off. Even-
tually, La Loca “prays real hard” (Castillo 1994, 38) for Caridad, and
completely restores her to her former physical self. Once restored, Cari-
dad has moments where she “goes away.” What she “sees” in these trances
always proves true, and her father capitalizes on her foresight and renews
his gambling. In other words, after the malogra [“evil spirit”] that rapes
and brutalizes her “takes advantage” of her, her father does, too. As Del-
gadillo suggests, the “beast” that attacks Caridad “metaphorically
describes the force of the institutionalized patriarchal relations that foster
disregard for women at every level of society” (1998, 907).
Eventually, however, Caridad and her horse, Corazón (“Heart”—
though also “core” or a term of endearment), move outside of town to a
small trailer that Doña Felicia owns. With the help of Doña Felicia, Cari-
dad begins her training as a curandera (healer). Caridad, rejecting the
40 RITCH CALVIN
patriarchal culture that has taken advantage of her, escapes the company
of men and joins the community of women. One day, while visiting the
shrine of the black Christ from Esquipúlas, she sees a woman, Esmeralda,
and falls in love. The encounter with Esmeralda, and Caridad’s com-
pelling attraction to her, unsettles Caridad so completely that she goes to
the hot springs for a bath. She disappears for an entire year, which she
spends living in a cave, another feminine-coded space. When several
young men “discover” her, she is proclaimed a saint. However, during this
period of self-reflection and reconnection with the natural world, Caridad
has become so strong that the young men are unable to lift her and carry
her out of the cave.
Caridad’s infatuation with Esmeralda deepens; however, Esmeralda
already loves another woman. When Caridad and Esmeralda go up on the
mesa to consult another clairvoyant, they hear the voice of the spirit
Tsichtinako calling them, and they run over the cliff together and are taken
away. In Castillo’s terms, the fact that Caridad and Esmeralda hear the
voice of a prepatriarchal spirit is crucial. According to Delgadillo “Tsichti-
nako or Tse che nako [. . .] is Thought Woman in the Keres cosmology, the
female spirit and intelligence that is everywhere and is everything” (1998,
904). In addition, this “ascension,” unlike that of La Loca, subverts the
patriarchal model. As Enid Álvarez suggests, “la ascensión. ¿No sería mejor
decir el descenso? En un giro paródico se invierte el mito de la ascensión
pues en lugar de subir a los cielos, ella baja a integrarse a la tierra” (“ascen-
sion? Wouldn’t it be better to say ‘descent?’ In a paradoxical turn, the myth
of ascension is inverted; instead of rising into the heavens, she descends to
be reintegrated into the Earth”) (1995, 145). For Caridad and her “lover,”
Esmeralda, escape from the oppressions of a patriarchal society leads them
to a prepatriarchal voice, to a prepatriarchal cosmology, to the loving and
nurturing embrace of a feminine-coded earth.
Through the characters of Caridad and Esmeralda, Castillo explores
a long-standing theme for women writers: What space can women
occupy outside of the patriarchal order? For example, Kate Chopin the-
matizes the question in her 1899 novel, The Awakening. When Edna Pon-
tillier rejects the patriarchal order, the space left for her is, presumably,
drowning in the sea. A similar situation arises in the film Thelma and
Louise when the two title characters, faced with certain capture and return
to the masculine order, drive over the cliff, clutching each others’ hands.
The scene from the film appears remarkably similar to Castillo’s scene in
which Caridad and Esmeralda leap over a cliff while holding hands. How-
ever, in the film, the characters are completely without any alternative.
They are faced with the choice of returning to the patriarchal order, or
not, and their choice leads them into oblivion, into the gaping void of the
canyon. With Caridad and Esmeralda, their escape from the patriarchal
order, in the person of the male stalker, signals a return to a prepatriarchal
order. Instead of a descent into oblivion, theirs is an “ascent” into another
signifying system.
Perhaps the clearest positive example of Castillo’s concept of the
‘Xicanista’ lies in the mother figure, Sofía (more commonly called “Sofi”).
She is a hard-working woman who runs a butcher shop, the Carne Buena
Carnecería, and raises her children as a single mother. Her husband,
Domingo, abandoned her and the children long ago, although he returns
after a twenty-year absence, walking in the front door as if nothing had
happened, as if no time had passed. Two days after her fifty-third birth-
day, and fed up with Domingo’s laziness, Sofía decides to run for mayor
of Tome and fix the things that need fixing. She is tired of outsiders mov-
ing into their hometown and exploiting them, is tired of being a “con-
formist” (Esperanza’s term), and wants to work for “community improve-
ment.” She sells shares of her Carnecería and creates a food cooperative.
As Sofía becomes more and more independent and more and more self-
assured, Domingo begins to feel more and more emasculated. For exam-
ple, she tells him, “And don’t call me ‘silly Sofi’ no more neither,” and,
“Do I look like a silly woman to you, Domingo?” (Castillo, 1994,
109–10). Eventually Sofi, La Abandonada (The Adandoned Woman)
kicks her husband out for good.
Through Sofi’s initiative and the hard work of the women of the
cooperative, they are able to sustain two dozen women and their families.
The women who are mothers are able to bring their children to work with
them, are able to earn college credits, and are able to produce inexpensive
and environmentally safe fruits and vegetables. While Sofi and the other
women had been socialized to believe that they had to rely on men to sus-
tain and support the family, they begin to move outside the patriarchal
order. They establish a new social order, built upon a nonpatriarchal ide-
ology, which is nonmaterialistic and serves the interests of all the com-
munity instead of exploiting the community for the benefit of a few.
According to Castillo, Sofía had many forebearers. Early Christian
mythology appropriated the Greek goddess Sofía and “her daughters and
turned them into martyrs.” However, Castillo reappropriates the mytho-
logical goddess in order to represent a woman who resists fate: “She takes
over. She doesn’t submit to that point in history when patriarchy took
over her authority” (Saeta 1997, 147).
42 RITCH CALVIN
The lessons of So Far from God seem brutal: leave the community,
assimilate into Anglo society, rely on men, remain vulnerable to a patri-
archal system, and death awaits. In the end, although Sofía loses all four
of her daughters, she emerges as a strong, confident, and productive sub-
ject. As Delgadillo argues, Castillo’s Sofía represents the possibilities for a
new “Chicana subjectivity that defines itself within the context of com-
munity and in league with the struggles of others attempting to overcome
marginality, subordination, and silence” and that the novel “attacks the
individualism that fuels a chaotic live-for-the-moment mentality by
showing us how that individualist ethic harms women, communities, and
the environment” (1998, 912–13) In other words, the “wise” Sofía
becomes the embodiment of Castillo’s concept of the Chicana feminist,
the Xicanista.
As Ana Castillo develops her concept of the Xicanista and Xican-
isma through her first three novels, The Mixquiahuala Letters, Sapogo-
nia, and So Far from God, she also develops her theoretical conception
in Massacre of the Dreamers, where she argues that many writers and
activists are moving away from the term Chicana because they see it as
“an outdated expression weighed down by the particular radicalism of
the seventies” (Castillo 1995a, 10). In its stead, Castillo employs two
distinct terms: Mexic Amerindian and Xicanista. She differentiates
between the two, depicting the former as the articulation and assertion
of “indigenous blood” and “the source, at least in part, of our spiritu-
ality” (Castillo 1995a, 10). For Castillo, ‘Mexic Amerindian,’ an “eth-
nic and racial” term, describes people from a certain area. ‘Xicanista’
describes an individual who is an activist, an individual who actively
seeks to improve the lives of women within the Chicano community,
who actively seeks alternative ontologies within a patriarchal order. Just
as people are reacting to the once-powerful and current term ‘Chicana’
as a sign of activism, Castillo argues that people are reacting against
feminism itself, which she views as an outdated movement from a spe-
cific historical and cultural moment, and an ideology relegated to aca-
demic classrooms. Her hope is to get Xicanisma out of conference
rooms and classrooms and into the work place and the home (Castillo
1995a, 11).
Castillo writes that Xicanisma is formed “in the acknowledgement
of the historical crossroad where the creative power of woman became
deliberately appropriated by the male society. And woman in the flesh,
thereafter, was subordinated. It is our task as Xicanistas, to not only
reclaim our indigenismo—but also to reinsert the forsaken feminine into
our consciousness” (1995a, 12). For Castillo, matriarchy is not the oppo-
site of patriarchy, and the goal of the Xicanista should not be the appro-
priation of all masculine ideals and behaviors. Instead, Xicanisma aims at
the reintegration of the feminine creative powers back into society and is
closely connected with “selected aspects of the traditional woman’s role in
Mexican/Latin American society (such as the virtues of patience, perse-
verance, commitment to one’s children), while rejecting the negative
stereotypes of women that emanate from mainstream machismo” (Milli-
gan 1999, 28).
Similarly, just as Castillo does not suggest the supplanting of patri-
archy with matriarchy, she does not suggest that Xicanisma, nor a Xican-
ista epistemology, should supplant any other epistemology: “[W]e are not
asserting that our perspective is the only legitimate one, that it is superior
to or should replace, repress, or censure others. What we are conscious of
is that our reality is vastly different from that of the dominant culture and
by any measure worth considering” (1995a, 5). The goal is a community
that understands and accepts alternative modes of knowing and integrates
feminine and masculine principles into society. For Ana Castillo, the goal
of Xicanisma entails creating a nonmaterialistic and nonexploitative soci-
ety, in which feminine principles of nurturing and community prevail.
That society incorporates spirituality as a daily lived experience and there-
fore overcomes any division between mind and body.
The theories Castillo develops in The Massacre of the Dreamers
appear in her fiction. For example, in her first novel, The Mixquiahuala
Letters, Teresa and Alicia confront the objectification and violence in their
relationships, traits they associate with the patriarchy. The two find them-
selves unable to establish “real intimacy” because of the competitive rela-
tionship patriarchy engenders. In Castillo’s second novel, Sapogonia, the
relationship between Pastora and Perla also dissolves in a brew of patri-
archy and materialism. By novel’s end, Pastora rejects the possibility of
liberal reforms and seeks a nonpatriarchal model.
In her third novel, So Far from God, Castillo develops the prototype
for the Xicanista, the “wise” Sofía. From the beginning of the novel, Sofi,
trapped within the traditional patriarchal order, with an irresponsible
husband who drinks and gambles away their money (and, eventually, the
deed to the house), must raise her four daughters alone. One by one, they
each reject the family, reject the community, and succumb to materialist
Anglo values. Sofía, however, emerges from her ordeal a strong, active
woman, who has brought together an entire community of women who
are now able to support themselves, without men, and without the mate-
rialist values of Anglo society. Sofi escapes the patriarchal order and pro-
duces a new Xicanista ontology, one that is no intellectual exercise but
rather a lived experience. Perhaps, then, the physical journey to Mexico is
an unnecessary one, and the Xicanista can find non- or prepatriarchal
models without leaving home.
2
Everday Revolutions, Shifting Power,
and Feminine Genius in
Julia Alvarez’s Fiction
Kelly Oliver
Julia Alvarez uses the conventions of domestic femininity, womanhood,

and motherhood to resist patriarchal authority both at the level of private
family life and in public institutions, including government. These uses
simultaneously demonstrate that resistance to domination involves shift-
ing power dynamics and strikingly underscore sexual difference in rela-
tion to power, resistance, and genius. Alvarez’s fiction powerfully portrays
how shifting power relations are gendered and are inflected by race and
class.
EVERYDAY REVOLUTIONS
Alvarez’s first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), doc-
uments various everyday struggles of women and girls against restrictive
traditions. The novel tells the stories of four sisters—Yolanda, Sandy,
Carla, and Fifi—who are exiled from the Dominican Republic along with
their parents because their father was involved in an attempt to overthrow
the dictator Trujillo. In a chapter entitled “A Regular Revolution,” Alvarez
suggests that revolution is a matter of “constant skirmishes” on a mun-
dane level (1991, 111). She compares the four daughters’ revolt against
their parents’ authority and against patriarchal authority to their father’s
participation in the revolt against the Trujillo dictatorship. The girls plot
their revolution using the accepted patriarchal codes for chaperones, and
for young ladies’ proper behavior, against those very codes. Alvarez shows
how the patriarchal traditions are turned against themselves in order to
undermine patriarchal authority. She imagines how everyday practices of
47
48 KELLY OLIVER
domination also open up everyday modes of resistance, how power is not

only the power to dominate, but also the power to resist.
In “A Regular Revolution” three of the sisters, Carla, Yolanda, and
Sandi, are trying to rescue the fourth, Fifi, from getting pregnant and
stuck marrying their very traditional, sexist island cousin Mundín. Here,
Mundín is called a “tyrant” and the girls are staging a “revolution,” “a
coup on the same Avenida where a decade ago the dictator was cornered
and wounded on his way to a tryst with his mistress” (1991, 127). The
girls use traditional restrictions on girls and women to their advantage
when they insist that their cousin and chaperone, Manuel, take them
home early without the lovers Mundín and Fifi. They use Manuel’s
responsibility for them to combat the “male loyalty” that “keeps the
macho system going” (127). Manuel is forced to take them home with-
out the lovers, which blows their cover. The “first bomb” explodes on the
women’s side of the patio when the girls report that Fifi is with Manuel
and then “there is an embarrassed silence in which the words her reputa-
tion are as palpable as if someone had hung a wedding dress in the air”
(129). The girls use the patriarchal convention that girls are not to be left
alone without their chaperone to expose the breach of another convention
that girls are not to be left alone with their novios. Their motives, how-
ever, are not to protect their sister’s reputation or virginity but to protect
her from the oppressive patriarchal culture that would demand and cir-
cumscribe marriage, family, and subservience to her husband.
The central plot of Alvarez’s third novel, In the Time of the Butter-
flies (1994), revolves around revolution, specifically the four sisters Mira-
bal—Dede, Patricia, Minerva, Maté—and their involvement in the
underground revolution against Trujillo. Again feminine revolution and
resistance are not painted in the broad strokes of bloody battles and
guerilla uprisings but in the mundane makeup of femininity. Alvarez’s
story of the Mirabal sisters’ revolution against Trujillo is as much about
their own everyday revolutions against the restrictions of patriarchy as it
is about a rebellion against the restrictions of dictatorship. In fact, the dic-
tator’s authority is depicted as founded on the macho image of a patriarch
who has his ways with women.
Like How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the But-
terflies describes how patriarchal conventions are used to undermine
patriarchal values and institutions and how the trappings of femininity
are used to fuel revolution—this time political as well as personal revolu-
tion. The church, crucifixes, and praying become forms of rebellion
(1994, 237). The sisters use the script they learned from the nuns for
Everyday Revolutions, Shifting Power, and Feminine Genius 49
writing out Bible passages to list the ammunition in their hiding places
(168). The sisters’ mental and physical discipline while in prison is com-
pared to keeping a baby on a feeding schedule (235). Maté uses her long
hair and hair ribbons to smuggle news stories to other prisoners and secret
notes detailing the human rights’ abuses of the Trujillo regime to the
Organization of American States’ representatives when they visit the
prison (246, 252). A young woman’s diary becomes incriminating evi-
dence against the dictatorship’s human rights’ abuses. The election of
“Miss University” becomes the promise of democratic elections; Minerva
tells Maté that “this country hasn’t voted for anything in twenty-six years
and it’s only these silly little elections that keep the faint memory of
democracy going” (136).
For the Mirabal sisters, love, family, and revolution are inseparable.
Passion between lovers feeds passion for revolution, and the common
struggle against the dictator fuels personal passion. For example, the
struggle for freedom keeps Minerva and her husband, Manolo, together
through difficult personal times. Maté falls in love with Leandro when she
meets him delivering ammunition for the revolutionaries. She sees the
revolution as her chance for personal independence from a family that
treats her like a baby. More than that, she realizes that her looks and easy
manner with men can serve the revolution. She writes in her diary,
“[N]ow I can use my talents for the revolution” (143). Patricia becomes
involved after her church group witnesses young guerillas attacked by Tru-
jillos soldiers. She sees the face of her own son Nelson in the face of a
dying young guerilla and from that moment on is committed to saving
her family by fighting Trujillo. All the while that these women are fight-
ing against the national patriarch, Trujillo, they are also fighting against
their own local patriarchs at home. They all have various skirmishes with
their father and their husbands in order to assert themselves against patri-
archal conventions.
If, as Minerva Mirabal says of the dance that cures her headache,
“one nail takes out another,” then she is the hammer (97). She knows how
to strike one nail of patriarchy against another in order to get what she
needs. When her father will not let her leave the farm to go to law school,
and when El Jefe (Trujillo) wants to make her his mistress, she eventually
convinces Trujillo to allow her go to law school to be near him in the city
(1994, 98). She pits the authority of Trujillo against her father’s author-
ity. When Trujillo suggests private meetings, she uses the patriarchal con-
ventions of propriety and honor to argue that it would not be honorable
of her to meet him alone (111). One nail of patriarchy takes out another.
50 KELLY OLIVER
Alvarez’s novel describes the ways in which femininity and women’s

restricted and stereotypical roles as guardians of the family and of religion
are put into the service of revolution—revolution against the dictatorship
and revolution against patriarchy. Confessional diaries become means not
only for personal therapy and self-surveillance but also for testimonies of
injustice and suffering. The trappings of femininity, such as beautiful long
hair, become means to deliver secret messages to the outside world.
Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies shows some of the ways in which the
very trappings of domination can be used to resist that domination. In
her fictional account of the Mirabal sisters’ participation in the resistance
to the Trujillo dictatorship, Alvarez imagines resistance not only to the
patriarchal power of the dictator but also to a more mundane patriarchal
power that subordinates women in their everyday lives.
SHIFTING POWER DYNAMICS
In addition to showing how women’s revolution happens through every-

day resistance, Alvarez’s novels also show how power dynamics are fluid
and change according to shifting gender, race, and class positions. In
one sense, Alvarez’s first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,
is a study in mobile and transitory points of resistance and shifting
power dynamics that fracture unity and affect regroupings. Throughout
this novel, Alvarez shows how power relations among race, class, and
gender are dynamic. For example, in the first chapter, “Antojos,”
Yolanda Garcia returns to the Dominican Republic after five years with-
out a visit and ventures into the countryside to pick fresh guavas. This
chapter opens with the narrator describing the color coding of class
hierarchy: old aunts in greys and blacks of widowhood, cousins in
bright colors, nursemaids in white uniforms, and kitchen help in black
uniforms (3). This chapter, and the book as a whole, repeatedly
recounts the deferential gestures that signal power relations among race,
class, and gender. When scolded for not having matches on hand to
light the candles on the cake, one of the maids, Iluminada, makes a
pleading gesture with her hands clasped against her breast (4). When
another maid, Altagracia, is asked to explain the word “antojo” to
Yolanda, she “puts her brown hands away in her uniform pockets” and
“says in a small voice. You’re the one to know” (8). These deferential ges-
tures signal class and race hierarchy and the differential power relation
in terms of class and race privilege.
Later in this chapter when Yolanda is picking guavas, and she gets a
flat tire, gender hierarchy displaces class hierarchy, and the power dynam-
ics shift. Alone with her car, Yolanda is terrified when two men appear out
of the grove with machetes hanging from their belts. She considers run-
ning, but she is paralyzed with fear and rendered speechless (19). The nar-
rator describes her repeating the same pleading gesture of Illuminada,
hands clasped on her chest (20). Yolanda’s class privilege in relation to the
maid, and in relation to the young boy, Jose, who has taken her to pick
the guavas, changes in relation to these two men whose gender privilege
is threatening to Yolanda. Now she is the one using deferential gestures.
The power dynamics again suddenly shift in this scene when she
begins speaking in English, and the two men conclude that she is Amer-
ican. At this point, they are “rendered docile by her gibberish,” and when
she mentions the name of her aunt’s rich friends, the Mirandas, “their eyes
light up with respect” (20–21). This scene captures the fluidity power
relations—class privilege has given way to gender privilege, and then the
relation between gender hierarchy and class heirarchy is reversed again. In
the end, when Yolanda tries to confirm her class privilege and express her
gratitude by paying the men, they refuse and look at the ground, as the
narrator tells us, with the same deferential gestures of Illuminada and the
little boy Jose (22). The chapter ends with Jose returning from the Miran-
das slapped, shamed, and accused of lying when he tells the guard that a
woman is out picking guavas alone. Even Yolanda’s dollar bills cannot
cheer him. The collusion of rigid gender and class structures results in
Jose’s punishment, which is only intensified when Yolanda offers him
money. Even in her attempts to make Jose happy, Yolanda reaffirms her
class dominance over him.
Although the novel is full of this type of power reversal and shifting
power dynamics, I will mention just one more example of fluctuating rela-
tions among race, class, and gender from chapter 10, “Floor Show.” As the
novel moves back in time, this chapter takes place in New York when the
Garcia girls are young, shortly after their family has fled the Trujillo dicta-
torship. Here, the Garcias have been invited to join Dr. Fanning and his
wife for dinner at a restaurant. Dr. Fanning arranged the fellowship that
allowed “Papi” Garcia to take his family to New York and was trying to
help Papi get a job. For days “Mami” gave the girls instructions on how to
behave, and the evening of the dinner she dressed them in binding braids
and tights in the hopes of disciplining not only their behavior but also
their bodies. The dinner scene is very tense because the Garcias, used to
having class privileges in the Dominican Republic, are financially
52 KELLY OLIVER
beholden to the Fannings. In their presence both Mami and Papi Garcia
display deferential gestures and repeatedly look down at the floor.
This chapter displays several reversals among race, class, and gender
hierarchies. First, because Mami Garcia studied in the United States as a
girl, her English is better than Papi’s, which gives her more power than
him in social situations: “Mami was the leader now that they lived in the
States. She had gone to school in the States. She spoke English without a
heavy accent” (176). The gender dynamic between mother and father is
reversed by the power of linguistic access. Class dynamics shift when the
Garcias, struggling to make ends meet in the United States, no longer
have class privilege. Papi no longer has the honor of paying for dinner.
The Fannings, who appeared in the Dominican Republic as silly-looking
tourists speaking bad Spanish, now make the Garcias look small (184).
Gender dynamics shift when Mrs. Fanning kisses Papi Garcia on the way
to the bathroom. In this context his class and race deference to Mrs. Fan-
ning make him powerless to object to her flirtations. Power dynamics
change again when Sandi, who witnessed the kiss, uses what she saw to
blackmail her father into allowing her to get a doll that they cannot afford
and for which the Fannings end up paying. Also in this chapter Sandi rec-
ognizes the value of passing as a white American when she studies her fair
skin and blue-eyed beauty in the mirror after she has seen the power Mrs.
Fanning exercised over her father with the kiss.
Fluid power dynamics are also central to In the Time of the Butter-
flies. Here, there is a scene similar to the Garcia Girls “Floor Show” where
a daughter becomes more powerful than her father when he wants her to
keep a secret from her mother. When Minerva Mirabal discovers that her
father has a secret second family, she gains power over her father; gender
and generation power relations shift. In the end, it is this second, illegiti-
mate family, much poorer and less powerful than the first, that smuggles
letters and care packages back and forth between the girls in prison and
their family at home; the class dynamic is reversed when the lower-class
family has access to the guards in a way unavailable to the upper-class
family. And, as we have seen, Alvarez’s fiction brings to life various ways
in which women and girls resist domination by turning patriarchal
restrictions to their advantage by using “one nail” of domination against
another.
Alvarez’s fiction exemplifies mobile and transitory sites of resistance
that reconfigure shifting power relations. These novels show some of the
ways in which individuals are furrowed by intersecting axes of power, cut
up and remolded and marked by their various positions in shifting power
relations that constantly regroup them in terms of race, class, and gender,
among other alliances. Alvarez’s novels make clear that the differential
norms for masculinity and femininity within patriarchal cultures circum-
scribe power relations differently for men and women. Alvarez is sensitive
to how women’s subject positions within patriarchal cultures affect their
sense of their own agency both in terms of their subjection to patriarchal
restrictions and in terms of their resistance to those restrictions.
For Alvarez, fiction shows us something about life that history
cannot; it speaks to the heart in a way that “immerses” readers in an
epoch and helps them to “understand” it. This understanding is not
intellectual but affective. Fiction helps us to understand the effects of
colonization, domination, and oppression on the affects of those
oppressed. Alvarez’s fiction gives us especially powerful portraits of the
effects of domination on women’s psyches and affects and how anger
and pain can be turned into resistance. Indeed, in the postscript to In
the Time of the Butterflies she tells us that “a novel is not, after all, a his-
torical document, but a way to travel through the human heart” (324)
and that an epoch of life “can only be understood by fiction, only finally
be redeemed by the imagination” (324).
In the same postscript, Alvarez also says that she presents neither the
real Mirabal sisters of fact nor the Mirabal sisters of legend, but she tries
to demythologize their courage by describing ordinary people. She pre-
sents their genius as everyday genius. More than this, she presents their
genius as feminine genius, the genius of penmanship, hair ribbons, feed-
ing schedules, and girls’ diaries. Alvarez’s portrait of these heroines who
gave their lives and their freedom for their beliefs paints a picture of ordi-
nary women doing what is necessary for themselves and their families. By
opening our imaginations to everyday genius Alvarez’s genius enriches our
own sense of possibility and freedom.
FEMININE GENIUS
Alvarez’s fiction thrives on what Julia Kristeva calls “female genius”

(2001). Although Kristeva does not fully develop a theory of female
genius when she valorizes three great women writers in three volumes
(Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klien, Colette), she does introduce her female
trilogy with some suggestions about female genius that have implications
for genius and psychic life in general. She suggests that genius and
geniuses are necessary for psychic life: we need geniuses to validate the
54 KELLY OLIVER
exceptional within our own lives, which is as true for women as it is for
men. Psychic life is dependent upon a sense of validation and legitimiza-
tion of the possibility of creativity and greatness for all of us. We need to
idealize geniuses and identify with them. But, in order to imagine ideal-
ization as identification, we also need to conceive of genius as a type of
social phenomena and the product of the lives of ordinary people who do
extraordinary things.
Implicit in Kristeva’s analysis are two types of female genius: one
that is documented by the creative and intellectual writings of great
women and another that is not documented or even appreciated, the
everyday genius of ordinary women, which speaks to the singularity of
each individual. Both forms of female genius have been and continue to
be devalued within our culture, which continues to be controlled by patri-
archal values. As I argue elsewhere, female genius in both of these forms
is an antidote to the colonization of psychic space and social melancholy
that result from a lack of accepting social support (Oliver 2004).
The figure of “the genius” opens up the imagination to the possi-
bility of one’s own genius and creativity in at least two respects. The ide-
alization of female geniuses and women’s contributions to culture provide
positive images of women and role models that support women’s and
girls’ positive sense of self. Genius in this traditional sense of an extraor-
dinary accomplishment (such as Kristeva’s examples of Arendt, Klein, and
Colette) provides women geniuses to idealize and with whom to identify.
Another way in which the figure of “the genius” opens imaginative possi-
bilities is through the recognition of genius as the extraordinary within
the lives of ordinary women. This opens up the social space for an imag-
inary identification with the possibility of creativity and the extraordinary
within everyday lives, promoting the sublimation of repressed affects into
signification. The notion that genius demonstrates the possibility of the
extraordinary—creativity and sublimation—within the ordinary shows
girls and women that they too are capable of sublimation that gives mean-
ing to their lives and to their experiences as girls and women. Both forms
of female genius promote the idealization and sublimation necessary to
resist patriarchal restrictions that hamper women’s creativity and to over-
come women’s depression insofar as it is caused by women’s oppression.
Women need their own geniuses, heroines of the spirit, in order to find
value in their own everyday genius.
Alvarez’s fiction presents both types of feminine genius and displays
the relations between consecrated, culturally recognized genius and the
genius of the ordinary lives of women; in her work these two types of fem-
inine genius are always intertwined. Through the genius of the everyday,
her heroines turn patriarchal restrictions and domination against them-
selves in order to initiate revolutions that resonate throughout all levels of
experience. The revolutions of Alvarez’s heroines are not monumental
actions that overthrow governments but everyday struggles with author-
ity that enable and empower resistance. Rather, they display the ways in
which the very trappings of femininity, womanhood, and motherhood
can be used against patriarchal values and institutions in order to open up
a space for women’s resistance to domination.
In her latest novel, In the Name of Salomé (2000), Alvarez again
imagines the world of everyday genius along with the ways in which ordi-
nary people are invested in, and rely on, the figure of genius in their
midst. The novel alternates between the life of one of the Dominican
Republic’s most acclaimed nineteenth-century poetesses, Salomé Ureña,
and the life of her daughter, Camille Henrîquez, a literature professor in
New York. Salomé dies when Camille is only three years old, and
throughout the novel Camille is searching for the remembrance of her
mother. The novel makes it clear that Camille strongly identifies with her
mother to the point of imagining that “she were somehow resurrecting
her mother in her own flesh” (2000, 121), and yet she feels inadequate to
her mother’s memory, in the shadow of her greatness, and the heir to
maternal depression. Childless and unmarried, Camille wanders through
the novel unable to sustain intimate attachments and mourning the loss
of her mother. She feels guilty for her mother’s death because as the novel
suggests it is Salomé’s pregnancy with Camille on top of her tuberculosis
that kills her (2000, 325). Camille identifies with her dead mother, even
the corpse of her mother, and she is unable to separate herself from her
mother. As a little girl she imagines her mother lives inside her because
she has her mother’s name. She imagines that she is both Camille and
Salomé: “Salomé Camilia, her mother’s name and her name, always
together! . . . ‘Here we are,’ she [Camille] calls out” (2000, 331).
Camille cannot find the words with which to express the pain of her
loss. Her identification with her lost mother results in the loss of herself.
She desperately attempts to identify with her mother’s creativity, with her
poetry, and to become a poet herself, but she is inhibited by the maternal
corpse that (as Julia Kristeva might say) she keeps locked up in the crypt
of her psyche. While her brother Pedro is able to sublimate the loss of his
mother and like Salomé create through writing, Camille’s creativity is sti-
fled by cultural expectations for a woman, by the loss of her mother, and
in particular by her brother’s criticisms. While he has the social support
56 KELLY OLIVER
necessary to find signifying practices through which to discharge mater-

nal affect, she is expected to conform to the role circumscribed for her as
a woman. Although Camille is a depressed character, her life is not with-
out its own revolutions. She refuses to marry but maintains a life-long
friendship with a lesbian lover, Marion. She gives up her teaching posi-
tion at Vassar to work for the revolution in Cuba. In her work toward lit-
eracy in Cuba, Camille realizes, “The real revolution could only be won
by the imagination. When one of my newly literate students picked up a
book and read with hungry pleasure, I knew we were one step closer to
the patria we all wanted” (347).
For the women in Alvarez’s novels, creative revolt or revolt of imagi-
nation operates as a counterweight to depression, in particular the depres-
sion that results from women’s oppression within patriarchal culture; as I
argue elsewhere, women’s depression can be diagnosed as “social melan-
choly” that results from oppression (Oliver 2004). The opposition between
depression and creativity is perhaps most apparent in Alvarez’s character
Salomé. The everyday expectations of her as a wife and mother and her
duties to her country as a woman take their toll. She gives up writing
poetry for the sake of these duties, and the result is depression, disease, and
ultimately death. With her poetry she found a way to sublimate her
depression. She repeats in the novel that “tears are the ink of the poet”;
rather than waste them by crying, she turns these painful affects into art.
Through poetry she finds a means by which to discharge affects and sub-
limate bodily drives and sensations. Without that means these affects, dri-
ves, and sensations become symptoms that manifest themselves in her
body now unable to express itself. When she sacrifices her creative genius
in order to take up roles traditionally assigned to women, she suffocates.
As she does in In the Time of the Butterflies, Alvarez presents Salomé’s
genius as part of an ordinary life, more particularly a woman’s life trou-
bled by the restrictions of patriarchy. There are several points in the novel
when Salomé reflects on the irony of fighting for national liberation while
she suffers the double standards and sexism of that nation: “Here she
was—enslaved to her family’s smallest demands and fighting for these
larger freedoms” (2000, 151). She recognizes that “there was another rev-
olution to be fought if our patria was to be truly free” (145)—a domestic
revolution to free women from patriarchal oppression, a revolution that
Alvarez suggests can only be won by the imagination. Revolt against patri-
archal institutions and values is one of imagination not only because it is
necessary to change the ways in which we imagine ourselves as men and
women but also because oppression takes its toll on the imagination and
on the ability to imagine and create value and meaning in one’s own life.
In her novels, Alvarez not only describes this imaginary revolt in the lives
and thoughts of her characters, but she also opens up the possibility of
imagining otherwise, of imagining strong women capable of agency and
making meaning for their own lives, of imagining women engaged in
everyday revolts, through her own creativity as a novelist.
Without creativity and revolt, women lack the ability to sublimate,
which is crucial for psychic life and the ability to find and create meaning
in life and language. Oppression undermines the possibility of sublima-
tion and thereby leaves women feeling empty, depressed, and passive,
without a sense of their own agency. Through sublimation bodily drives
and their attenuating affects become discharged in signifying practices;
and insofar as signification is dependent upon the discharge of drives, we
could say that through the process of sublimation drives become signifi-
cation. The meaning of language is dependent upon the process of subli-
mation of drives and affects into words. Infants enter language by virtue
of sublimating their drives or bodily needs into forms of communication;
their early means of communication can be seen as primordial modes of
sublimation. At the other end of the spectrum, the depressive gives up on
words because of a breakdown in the process of sublimation such that dri-
ves and affects are no longer discharged in language. When drives and
affects become cut off from words, the result is depression (Cf. Kristeva
1989). As I argue elsewhere, in its most severe forms, depression is the
inability to sublimate (Oliver 2004).
In the Name of Salomé can be read as a lesson in the importance for
women’s psychic life of maintaining the space of creativity and sublima-
tion. As we have seen, Camille’s poetic voice is stifled by patriarchal
restrictions and expectations placed on women. And, without the creative
revolt provided by her poetry, Salomé suffers what her son calls “moral
asphyxiation” (2000, 281). Although her husband, Pancho, falls in love
with Salomé’s poetry and image as the national poetess, once they marry
Salomé’s duties to her him and his sense of her duties to the nation (which
includes opening a school rather than writing poetry, particularly love
poetry), and her duties to her children, overtake her passion for poetry.
Her poetry is what keeps her alive, and when that is taken from her by
the demands and expectations of patriarchal culture, she dies exhausted
and depressed. Indeed, throughout the novel, poetry serves as an antidote
to depression: “‘Tears are the ink of the poet,’ Papá had once said. But I
was no longer writing, I could waste them now on my own sadness”
(259). By sacrificing her voice for the sake of her family and her nation,
58 KELLY OLIVER
in the end she sacrifices herself. Ultimately, the everyday revolts that sus-
tain psychic life through creativity and imagination are essential forms of
resistance against women’s oppression that results in depression and psy-
chic (if not physical) death. If depression is one symptom of oppression,
a symptom with a female face, then resistance, particularly everyday revolt
and feminine genius, is a prescription for psychic freedom.
3
Authorizing Desire
Erotic Poetics and the Aisthesis of Freedom

in Morrison and Shange
oppression/makes us love one another badly/makes our

breathing
mangled/while i am desperately trying to clear the air/
in the absence of extreme elegance/
madness can set right in like
a burnin gauloise on Japanese silk.
though highly cultured/
even the silk must ask
how to burn up discreetly.
—Ntozake Shange, “a photograph: lovers in motion”
Oppression has at least two existential characteristics: (1) it aims to reduce

the oppressed to the status of an object, and (2) it excludes the oppressed
from the community of those regarded as having the capacity and the
authority to make meanings and establish values. In The Ethics of Ambi-
guity, Simone de Beauvoir specifically identifies manipulation of desire as
a primary mechanism through which oppression is exercised and finds its
most destructive effects. If desire, or passion as Beauvoir and Sartre call it,
is important for the realization of freedom, incapacitating it—extinguish-
ing desire or mutilating it in some way—would have detrimental conse-
quences for the pursuit of making a life of meaning and purpose. Similar
ideas are advanced and further developed in the work of Drucilla Cornell
(1998 and 1995), who, as discussed later, makes the case for what she
describes as imaginative agency. This chapter develops the outlines of a
59
theoretical framework for considering the relation between freedom and

desire for applications in investigations of artistic practices of resistance
that aim at producing transgressive expressions of desire and what I shall
describe as the aisthesis (or felt quality) of freedom. The poetics of desire,
or erotic poetics, provide a vehicle for formulating an answer to the ques-
tion, What would it be good for me (or for us) to want ? rather than
address the question, What should I (or we) do? which is the context in
which imagination has been explored most often in the area of moral psy-
chology. Erotic poetics allows us to conceive, formulate, and reformulate
affiliations that enhance our participation in a social eroticism, an econ-
omy in which our energies are oriented toward forging significant rela-
tions with each other and striving together toward creating a social order
that cultivates and enhances capabilities. (See also Ferguson 1989 on
social eroticism.)
To illustrate some cases in point, I open a discussion of Ntozake
Shange’s choreopoem “Spell #7” and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Both works
exemplify concern with the problem of revaluing what oppression deni-
grates. Both seek meaningful agency emerging out of a situation that is
affectively incapacitating. I read Shange’s work in particular as endeavor-
ing to open different possibilities for loving—as producing an erotic poet-
ics—and I look to Morrison’s work for insights relevant to moral psy-
chology and for an invitation to contemplate what difference it makes in
having experience (or a lack thereof ) of the felt quality of freedom.
DESIRE AND FREEDOM IN BEAUVOIR
In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir casts her own light on the situation
of human existence—neither god nor thing, we live as liminal creatures
who often find themselves drawn toward one or the other end of this
pole. Sartre, of course, names that desire—longing to be either god (for
Sartre, pure transcendence, absolute subjectivity) or thing (pure imma-
nence, absolute objectivity)—bad faith. For Sartre, the temptations of
bad faith are numerous, nearly ubiquitous, and it becomes difficult to see
how we are anything but damned or how a meaningful social existence
is possible. Beauvoir is similarly wary of bad faith. Her Ethics of Ambi-
guity operates largely within a Sartrean ontological framework, but for
her the trap of bad faith is not inevitable: she distinguishes the desire to
disclose being from the wish to possess or coincide with the object of
desire.
Authorizing Desire 61
According to both Sartre and Beauvoir, projects of bad faith funda-

mentally aim at fleeing our freedom. We pursue it in order to mollify anx-
iety in the face of freedom and to avoid the metaphysical risks involved in
what Sartre describes as “making ourselves a lack of being” or exercising
transcendence. Beauvoir also recognizes this tendency, which she
describes as a desire to flee freedom that stems from our nostalgia for the
security and cheerfulness of childhood.
The child’s world is a serious one, but it is one for which she or he bears
no responsibility. The serious world, characterized by what both Sartre and
Beauvoir identify with the “spirit of seriousness,” is one comprised of ready-
made values. The child in the serious world considers the world as given, val-
ues as inherent, and the adults who structure their lives as having pure being.
One may live in such a world playfully because “the domain open to his sub-
jectivity seems insignificant and puerile in his own eyes” (Beauvoir 1948,
35). And one may pursue some measure of freedom within it only insofar as
one seeks the realization of those values and traverses the path toward being
that is worn by those beings one takes to be complete. This is not to say that
children live in bad faith, of course, since children are not yet aware of their
subjectivity and do not have a sense of inhabiting the world in any other way.
(Beauvoir thinks it is conceivable that eighteenth-century slaves and “the
Mohammedan woman enclosed in a harem” [1948, 38] have a similar exis-
tence.) However, once one matures in one’s subjectivity and becomes
acquainted with one’s freedom, then the nostalgia for the serious-but-care-
free world of the child, the desire to trade freedom for security, and the res-
ignation or outright denial of one’s responsibility, constitute bad faith.
If Sartre sees this desire as ultimately damning, Beauvoir does not.
It is not the desire itself that is dangerous, but rather the mistaken notion
that desiring is terminable, that it aims at a satisfaction of completion. It
is not possession of the object itself that desire genuinely seeks, Beauvoir
claims, but rather the process of disclosure itself (cf. Ferguson 1989, 73–74
and 77–99). What desire as passion celebrates is the disclosive character
of human existence, an idea more akin to Heidegger’s view than Sartre’s.
In other words, Beauvoir sees human beings as realizing their existence in
disclosing possible ways of being and bringing forth their meanings. She
characterizes it thus: Human existence has its being in “vitality, sensitiv-
ity, and intelligence,” which are not themselves “ready-made qualities, but
a way of casting oneself into the world and of disclosing being”:
Every man casts himself into the world by making himself a lack of being; he
thereby contributes to reinvesting it with human signification. He discloses it.
And in this movement even the most outcast sometimes feel the joy of exist-
ing. There is vitality only by means of free generosity. Intelligence supposes
good will, and inversely, a man is never stupid if he adapts his language and
his behavior to his capacities, and sensitivity is nothing else but the presence
which is attentive to the world and to itself. The reward for these spontaneous
qualities issues from the fact that they make significances and goals appear in
the world. They discover reasons for existing. They confirm us in the pride
and joy of our destiny as man. (Beauvoir 1948, 41–42)
Beauvoir describes our living out this destiny as “living warmth,” or pas-
sion, and she associates it with love and desire. It is a kind of loving that
invests human activity with meaning, a kind of loving that bestows
human existence itself with value. Such desire is directed by ends, no
doubt, but its pleasure is not sustained by acquiring those ends. The plea-
sure of desire, desire’s delight, unfolds in the perpetual pursuit and recre-
ation of those ends. And this is what grounds our pursuit of freedom for
others, according to Beauvoir. We desire the freedom of others to multi-
ply these possibilities. The freedom of the other provides an opening to
the social in which the meanings that we make take on their significance.
These ideas become somewhat clearer in Beauvoir’s discussion of
oppression, which emphasizes the significance of the freedom of others
for us and elaborates the crucial role of desire in the exercise of freedom
and the realization of its ecstasies. In the situation of oppression, the
oppressed is both reduced to pure facticity, regarded as an absence of
human transcendence, and explicitly denied opportunities for meaning-
ful transcendence insofar as the oppressed is excluded from participation
in the production of social meanings. Obviously, a person cannot be
stripped of her metaphysical freedom since human existence is radically
free according to the existential framework. But it can happen that in the
situation of oppression, the possibilities of the joyful exercise of freedom
can be diminished insofar as the prospects for meaningful transcendence
are minimized or eliminated. Beauvoir writes: “As we have already seen,
every man transcends himself. But it happens that this transcendence is
condemned to fall uselessly back upon itself because it is cut off from its
goals. That is what defines a situation of oppression. Such a situation is
never natural: man is never oppressed by things” (1948, 81). In other
words, there exists a social reality that provides the context in which one’s
ability to make meanings, one’s participation in the production of values,
meaningfully occurs. Excluded from that community, incapacitated for
such participation, one is unable to make the movements of desire that
freedom requires. Beauvoir continues:
As we have seen, my freedom, in order to fulfill itself, requires that it

emerge into an open future: it is other men who open the future to me, it
is they who, setting up the world of tomorrow, define my future; but if,
instead of allowing me to participate in this constructive movement, they
oblige me to consume my transcendence in vain, if they keep me below the
level which they have conquered and on the basis of which new conquests
will be achieved, then they are cutting me off from the future, they are
changing me into a thing. (1948, 82)
And one need not be actively and repeatedly excluded from this process
in order to be oppressed. Perversions of desire that draw one toward fruit-
less endeavors and mechanical gestures are sufficient for cultivating in the
oppressed a desire that wills one’s own exclusion from the meaningful cre-
ation of the future. Beauvoir continues:
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and surpassing itself; if all it
does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, and human existence
is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation; a life justifies itself only if
its effort to perpetuate itself is integrated into its surpassing and if this sur-
passing has no other limits than those which the subject assigns himself.
Oppression divides the world into two clans: those who enlighten
mankind by thrusting it ahead of itself and those who are condemned to
mark time hopelessly in order merely to support the collectivity; their life
is a pure repetition of mechanical gestures; their leisure is just about suffi-
cient for them to regain their strength; the oppressor feeds himself on their
transcendence and refuses to extend it by a free recognition. The oppressed
has only one solution: to deny the harmony of that mankind from which
an attempt is made to exclude him, to prove that he is a man and that he
is free by revolting against the tyrants. In order to prevent this revolt, one
of the ruses of oppression is to camouflage itself behind a natural situation
since, after all, one can not revolt against nature. (1948, 82–83)
Diminish desire and the oppressed effect their own exclusion since they do
not want to participate in the pursuit and recreation of ends that afford the
ecstatic life, the life of metaphysical risk, of “being thrown dangerously
beyond” ourselves, the stakes of which are the very meanings of our lives.
For Beauvoir, the world that oppression erects is one plagued by the
spirit of seriousness. It affirms the oppressive order as “a natural situa-
tion,” a world that one cannot change and against which one cannot hope
to successfully revolt. One cannot know the joy of the “destiny” of human
existence caught within a world of ready-made values. There is a kind of
existential retelling of the story of the Judeo-Christian “Fall of
Humankind” at work in this idea: Just as the mythical first human beings
traded paradise for the pleasures and pains of knowledge, the existential-
ist sees the human condition as characterized by a brokerage of the plea-
sures of lacking responsibility (for the meaning and significance of one’s
life) for the anxieties of subjectivity and its joyful possibilities. The only
escape from the serious world is revolt, a thoroughgoing rebellion. One
cannot merely make modest modifications in such world: “[T]he
oppressed can fulfill his freedom as a man only in revolt, since the essen-
tial characteristic of the situation against which he is rebelling is precisely
its prohibiting him from any positive development; it is only in social and
political struggle that his transcendence passes beyond to the infinite”
(Beauvoir 1948, 87).
THE DILEMMA OF REVOLT: FANON’S CASE
But precisely how does one undertake such a revolt? The logic of rebel-
lion that Beauvoir heralds appears to require a revaluing of precisely that
which grounds the oppression of the other. It demands that “the essential
characteristic of the situation” (Beauvoir 1948, 87) be challenged. In his
Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon contemplates his possibilities for revolt
within an existentialist framework, and he struggles to apply it to the par-
ticular situation of the colonized, who are subjugated and marked by “the
fact of blackness.”
Fanon scrutinizes Sartre’s assessment of the attempted revaluation of
“blackness” in the poetics of “negritude,” which aims to affirm and posi-
tively define the very difference that serves as the basis of exploitation for
the colonizers. In his 1948 preface to Black Orpheus, Sartre claims:
In fact, negritude appears as the minor term of a dialectical progression:
The theoretical and practical assertion of the supremacy of the white man
is its thesis; the position of negritude as an antithetical value is the
moment of negativity. But this negative moment is insufficient by itself,
and the Negroes who employ it know this very well; they know that it is
intended to prepare the synthesis or realization of the human in a society
without races. Thus negritude is the root of its own destruction, it is a
transition and not a conclusion, a means and not an ultimate end. (xl;
cited in Fanon 1967, 133)
But Fanon himself questions whether any movement can be authentic if

regarded as merely a turn in a larger historical process. How can one pos-
sibly regard one’s sense of one’s own worth in such terms? When one’s very
life is on the line, when what one endeavors is the poetic transformation
of the meaning of one’s very own existence and future possibilities, how
could one simultaneously hold the new valuation as a mere means to yet
another end, the “real” or legitimate one that differs from what one had
taken as one’s poetic aim? Sartre essentially claims that a poetics of black-
ness, insofar as it seeks to valorize the fact of blackness, simply reverses the
very terms against which it aims to rebel. It inverts the content (i.e., what
was bad is now good) without obliterating the form, and hence it fails to
escape what it aims to overthrow, the terms of valuation itself. If this is so,
what remains for the colonized to do; whence comes liberation from
oppression of this sort? Whence comes a legitimate black identity? Can
there be a black voice that authorizes meaning and writes its own signifi-
cance? What direction of desire could be liberating? What should the col-
onized want? Fanon laments, “I wanted to be typically Negro—it was no
longer possible. I wanted to be white—that was a joke. And, when I tried,
on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it
was snatched away from me. Proof was presented that my effort was only
a term in the dialectic” (1967, 132; emphasis added).
If the poetics of blackness cannot escape failure, what is to be done
to escape what physically cannot be fled, namely, the facticity that serves
as the basis of the oppression, the abiding fact of blackness? The revalua-
tion of blackness seems the only available way out. Fanon writes immedi-
ately following Sartre’s assessment cited above, “When I read that page, I
felt that I had been robbed of my last chance” (1967, 133). He later
explains, “And so [as Sartre sees it] it is not I who make a meaning for
myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting
for me. It is not out of my bad nigger’s misery, my bad nigger’s teeth, my
bad nigger’s hunger that I will shape a torch with which to burn down the
world, but it is the torch that was already there, waiting for that turn of
history” (1967, 134). He continues, “[M]y shoulders slipped out of the
framework of the world, my feet could no longer feel the touch of the
ground. Without a Negro past, without a Negro future, it was impossible
for me to live my Negrohood. Not yet white, no longer wholly black, I
was damned” (138). If the poetics of negritude fail, at least in cases in
which they constitute reversals of the values they aim to reject, what then
can serve as the basis of revolt in situations of racialized oppression? Per-
haps, one might claim, Fanon’s account better reveals an inherent contra-
diction in existential thought than it does a fatal flaw in black poetry. Per-
haps we can resolve the dilemma articulated by Fanon by simply rejecting
the existential account of meaning and human existence. Fanon himself
is not wholly willing to do so, and I do not think this contradiction that
Fanon forcefully illuminates necessarily requires us to throw out the baby

with the bathwater.
The existential framework sketched above from Beauvoir’s work
fails to account for one very important idea. In the summary of Beauvoir’s
discussion of the frivolity of the child in the serious world, I indicated that
Beauvoir claims that one who is childlike lives playfully in the serious
world (that is a world of ready-made values) until one becomes familiar
with the nature of human subjectivity as fundamentally and radically free.
Beauvoir indicates, without elaborating, the importance of imagination
for envisioning a possible future when she writes that “the goal toward
which I surpass myself must appear to me as a point of departure toward
a new act of surpassing. Thus a creative freedom develops happily with-
out ever congealing into unjustified facticity” (1948, 27–28).
But what propels one toward taking those goals? What enables one
to see as one must in order for “a point of departure toward a new act of
surpassing” to in fact appear ? (Beauvoir 1948, 27). It seems that what is
necessary, as Beauvoir claims, is “an apprenticeship of freedom” (1948,
37). Precisely how does one become apprenticed in freedom? What leads
us to that knowledge such that it animates an entire form of life? What
makes freedom our familiar? Without an account of this, it seems to me,
a tremendous chasm is left in the existential view. To describe it merely
as consciousness raising does not seem sufficient. After I become aware
of injustices in the serious world that would keep me its subject, how do
I acquire the sense that there is something to be done about it, and that
I am the one (perhaps together with others who share my situation) to
do it? What directs my own way out of the serious world? And if the seri-
ous world is the only one I have known and the only one I have previ-
ously thought possible, whence comes my direction for conceiving its
alternatives?
OPENINGS TO OTHERNESS: THE IMAGINARY DOMAIN
Although she is not writing in response to these questions as I have posed

them, Drucilla Cornell articulates a conception of the imaginary domain
and its fundamental significance for the realization of subjectivity that is
relevant. Cornell describes a conceptual space in which one exercises the
freedom to do the work of conceiving the world as other, of imagining a
world one wants as one’s own, of pursuing other modes of disclosure, and
of revealing other forms of reality. What she describes as “the imaginary
domain” is “that psychic and moral space in which we [. . .] are allowed

to evaluate and represent who we are” (Cornell 1998, x; cf. Cornell 1995).
Cornell discusses the imaginary domain specifically in terms of sexual
desire and sexuate being, but it could apply to desire generally and other
specific ways of being. Cornell further describes the imaginary domain as
what “gives to the individual person, and her only, the right to claim who
she is through her own representation of her [sexuate] being. Such a right
necessarily makes her the morally [and legally] recognized source of what
[the] meaning [of her sexual difference] is for her” (1998, 10).
Having access to the imaginary domain activates the possibility for
change—insofar as different forms of existence emerge as options to pur-
sue or reject—and hence the imaginary domain facilitates a more rigor-
ous exercise of our agency. Cornell writes that “the imaginary domain is
the space of the ‘as if ’ in which we imagine who we might be if we made
ourselves our own end and claimed ourselves as our own person” (1998,
8). Simply put, the imaginary domain is that space in which not merely
what we desire—or what we take to be the good—is derived but also the
shape of desire is given its form in terms of how desire unfolds, how its
ends might be pursued. Cornell describes the kind of freedom exercised
in the imaginary domain as “freedom of personality.” It “is valuable
because it is what lets us make a life we embrace as our own” (1998, 62).
Cornell’s work significantly enhances and fills out the framework of
freedom and desire I have drawn from Beauvoir and that I have made
more complex and problematic by engaging Fanon, but it would be use-
ful to see it in action, to get a sense of a concrete application of the uti-
lization of an imaginary domain. And Cornell’s view still leaves what I
perceive as a gap—namely, some account of what other resources one
might need to flourish in that space. We need to know what allows for the
experimentations of subjectivity the imaginary domain affords. For better
appreciation of these considerations, I shall turn to Ntozake Shange
whose choreopoem “Spell #7: geechee jibara quik magic trance manual
for technologically stressed third world people” explicitly thematizes the
nature of poetic power and considers how one might tap it.
ACTING OUT: THE ECSTASIES AND

AGENCY OF SHANGE’S EROTIC POETICS
Shange’s “Spell #7” focuses on the lives of a group of black actors and their
friends who struggle to negotiate their oppressive situation. “Betinna,” an
actress, describes her experience in the (white) world that determines and
constructs her as being black when she says of herself, “I am theater”
(Shange 1981b, 24). To be black is to be already defined, to already have a
role, to be a reluctant actor on a white stage. Betinna also recognizes that
her possibilities for transcending that role (living out the “fact” of black-
ness) lie in acting out of it. At best, she and the other characters in the play
are socially invisible, unrecognized as legitimate candidates for living a
human life; at worst, they are despised, devalued, and even physically and
mentally destroyed. Their possibilities for acting out are limited, since
access to many of the ordinary means of such transcendence is prohibited
to them.
What they need is magic, “blk magic” [sic], that will allow them not
merely to be satisfied with themselves but to be loved—to become sub-
jects enabled by “loving perception,” a perspective that invests what it
perceives as potent and full of possibilities, possessed with the capacity for
transfiguration. (The concept of ‘loving perception’ figures prominently
in certain works in feminist and Africana literature. It is initially defined
in Frye 1983. Cf. Lugones 1987 and Gordon 1997.) The characters in
“Spell #7” need a magic space in which they can conjure the creative
energy necessary for exercising meaningful agency. And they need an
opportunity to practice magic: they need to somehow acquire the means
to engage in transforming the negative values they have been given by
others into those they can affirm as beautiful and significant. I take it this
is another way of envisioning the tasks and possibilities of a poetics of
negritude mentioned above.
In the context of existential literature, magic appears to be signifi-
cantly related to desire. One might say that magic seeks to transform the
impossible, to render it within the realm of possibility. Translated into the
language of the existentialists with whom I began this chapter, magic aims
at the conversion of facticity to transcendence; magic seeks to open as a
candidate for otherness (as a candidate for legitimate longing-to-be-other)
what has been confined to the realm of brute facts. I think Toni Morri-
son’s The Bluest Eye provides a rich basis for a more thorough exploration
of how the desire to practice magic constitutes an effort to conjure “an
imaginary domain.” But such desire is not always creative, not always
truly enabling, as one witnesses in the case of Pecola, as I shall discuss in
the section that follows. In Shange’s “Spell #7” “blk magic” is also risky:
the play opens with the magician “lou” recounting how his own father
retired from magic when lou was just a child. One of lou’s young friends
asked his father to practice his magic by making him white. “All things
are possible,” lou recalls, “but aint no colored magician in his right
mind/gonna make you white” (Shange 1981b, 8). Lou and his father
practice magic for the purpose of “fixin you up good/fixin you up good
& colored” (8). They aim at making black life good and desirable. When
the child asked for whiteness instead, the blk magician’s practice was
entirely undermined and drained of all its potentency.
Poetry and dance are the means through which the characters of
“Spell #7” attempt to bring their work to fruition. One of the characters,
a poet named Eli, claims that “whoever that is authorizing poetry as an
avocation/is a fraud/put yr own feet on the ground” (1981a, 25). Creat-
ing poetic expression is described as “authorizing”—drawing on senses of
both being an author (“authoring”) and granting or grounding legitimacy
(“authorizing”). Being a creator is simultaneously granting power, sanc-
tioning, and providing sufficient grounds for the values and worldviews it
establishes. To do so in a way that considers the activity as merely a hobby,
to write poetry recklessly, is fraudulent. Grounding the significance of
one’s life is an endeavor that requires a kind of serious energy, but some
things break a spirit of that capacity and diminish its possibilities for cre-
ative activity, for poiesis (the practice of poetry broadly conceived in terms
of articulating and reshaping meaningful significances in one’s life and
one’s community). As the choreopoem unfolds, the characters strive to
reach the place in which that rift can be transcended, in which magic,
specifically “blk magic,” can happen. The choreopoem represents
Shange’s effort to conceive a formal structure that is specific enough to
succeed in defining meanings and values that can take hold and yet flex-
ible enough to offer others transformative possibilities.
In her foreword to the collection in which “Spell #7” is published,
Shange indicates that her work aims to provide an alternative to the “arti-
ficial aesthetics” of a “european framework for european psychology”
(1981a, ix). She is specifically concerned to amplify possibilities for com-
munication beyond the verbal, claiming that in her choreopoems,
“music functions as another character” (1981a, x). The choreopoem is a
poetic amalgamation that draws its elements from choreography, theater,
and a variety of meters and musical rhythms. It is a novel dramatic,
poetic framework aimed at generating and giving shape to alternative
forms of creative expression and producing transformative manifesta-
tions of desire. In these works, the “person/body, voice &
language/address the space as if [they] were a band/a dance company &
a theater group all at once, cuz a poet shd do that/create an emotional
environment/felt architecture” (1981a, xi).
Shange’s use of language, which some have seen as an effort to

destroy the English language as such, is more creative than destructive.
Although Shange does regard “the King’s English” as a straightjacket that
supports oppression and limits creative expression, she is not merely seek-
ing to destroy it by using it recklessly. In an interview Shange explains that
“language will allow us to function more competently and more wholly
in a holistic sense as human beings once we take hold of it and make it
say what we want to say” (Shange and Lester 1990, 727). And a number
of her characters struggle to achieve precisely that aim. Choreopoetic
structure opens spaces ordinarily closed by other dramatic forms by giv-
ing a more prominent place to the full sense of lived embodiment through
movement and by tapping the emotive qualities of music. When language
fails or cannot reach its aim, music and dance step in. But these elements
are not merely surrogates for speech, and narrative wholeness does not
loom over the work as the ideal for which the characters should strive and
in light of which they are deficient. Rather, the nonlinguistic elements are
themselves in a supralinguistic dialogue: music and dance do not merely
stand in for speech, they also serve to produce the psychic space in which
new articulations and new conceptualizations might occur. The opening
scene in which the magician lou sings, dances, mimes, performs, boasts,
offers a speech, whispers secrets, and addresses both the audience and the
characters works to conjure a specific place—an imaginary domain—in
which what is impossible in the serious white world in which the actors are
thrown is bracketed out, disabled, or suspended. It is that transformation of
impossibility to possibility—to realize an acting out that is not dependent
upon, relative to, or bound by the terms defined by whiteness—that con-
stitutes the practice of lou’s magic.
Shange’s characters’ use of language reflects not only their attempts
to make it speak their own voice but also the fact that they are “con-
stricted” and “amputated” characters (xiii), whose movements and musi-
cal vocalizations both mirror their dismemberment and mark their efforts
to poetically transform and transcend them. The limits of their desire
have been defined in terms of two equally impossible directives—either
desire to be a slave (in other words, desire to have your desire wholly
determined by another) or desire to be white (in other words, desire to
renounce all desire insofar as being anything would require you to give up
that process of becoming described earlier as the direction of desire toward
disclosing being). Shange challenges her characters and her audience to
sing and dance their way out of this false dilemma in the absence of a lib-
erative narrative framework in which they might insert themselves.
Shange claims that “literature, if it does nothing else, should stimu-

late one’s imagination to know that there is more—maybe not more ‘out
there,’ but more inside of us that we can use for our own survival”
(Shange and Lester 1990, 729). Shange’s choreopoetry aims to engage
that imagination. It seeks to provide openings for the direction of imagi-
native re-membering (both a drawing on the past and a reconstitution of
a meaningful world in which one can be a full participant) and the circu-
lation of affirmative desire. It opens new and different circuits for lov-
ing—in the sense of valuing—that enable the transformation of desire
that has been distorted by oppression. This is the practice of authorizing
that is realized in erotic poetics.
Similar conceptions of poetic power and its social applications are
advanced in Audre Lorde’s well known “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as
Power.” And one finds in Toni Morrison’s work, particularly Beloved, con-
nections drawn among the feeling of power, the development of human
agency, and the materialization of freedom. I conclude by briefly consid-
ering both of these works in order to elaborate how the aisthesis of free-
dom—the feeling of oneself as free and rich with possibilities—is linked
with the creative power of being a maker of meaning and pleasure, and
how erotic poetic practice—the engagement of desire enabled for autho-
rizing—affords the creative resources for transgressive resistance.
POETIC POWER AND THE AISTHESIS OF FREEDOM
In her well-known “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde
articulates and distinguishes a sense of the erotic as a form of loving that
draws one out of oneself. It is tied to the creative power of producing
meanings and determining worthy goals, and it provides a significant
form for resistance. She recognizes that one way in which oppression
operates and incapacitates its victims is through the manipulation of
desire: “In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or dis-
tort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed
that can provide energy for change” (Lorde 1984).
Lorde vividly describes the relation between the erotic and a sense
of power connected with expressive feeling (contrasted with mere sensa-
tion). She explicitly connects this desire to creative production (e.g., writ-
ing poetry, dance) and aesthetic experience in everyday life (e.g., “moving
into the sunlight against the body of the woman I love”). She describes
how the erotic opens aesthetic possibilities and creates a “clearing” for joy:
“Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the

open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body
stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest
rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically sat-
isfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a
poem, examining an idea.” Lorde envisions an erotic poetic practice that
affords transgressive resistance. It is transformative and generates a basis
for political resistance that is not merely reactionary. What Lorde’s erotic
poetics aim at is activation and engagement of the aisthesis of power—a
capacity that is not contingent upon the acquisition of power over others
but that is lived out through effective action with others, bodied forth in
the world.
The creative activity of art reflects a way of organizing the world (or
a part thereof ). As we experience the work of art, we experience that
structuring, that organization. Aesthetic experiences similarly organize us
by taking us through a variety of organized structures. Art effects how we
experience ourselves (our own form and its possibilities), our relations
with others, and how we encounter and make sense of our worlds. Our
experience of the shaping that happens in art shapes us. Our engagement
of different aesthetic qualities in art makes us different, too—it enforms
us with a sense of shaping itself, of what it means to actively give shape
and form. Works of art work in and through us. It is in this way that aes-
thetic experience is transfiguring and transformative.
Both words transfiguration and transformation indicate reshaping,
remolding, and rearranging. They suggest a further development, an
imposition of a new form, a stage, or a process of forming. Insofar as aes-
thetic experience provides opportunities for transformation and transfig-
uration, it provides (quite literally) an exercise of imagination that is vital
not only for our appreciation of art but also for projecting ourselves as
other than what we are at any given moment. John Dewey has argued that
it is this very aspect of art that makes it “the chief instrument of the
good,” “more moral than moralities” (1987, 350). Citing Shelly, Dewey
describes the significance of the power of imaginative projection thus:
“‘The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our nature and the
identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought,
action, or person, not our own. A man to be greatly good must imagine
intensely and comprehensively.’” Imaginative projection, ignited by love
(or what I have described here as the erotic), aims at a kind of standing
out of ourselves (ecstasy), a way of being drawn out of our nature, and
allows us to transgress the boundaries that appear to be drawn between
ourselves and others. To imagine ourselves as other is absolutely crucial

for our growth as individuals: for setting goals, imagining the kinds of
persons we want to become, and devising a route to get there.
And imagining ourselves as other is an important way in which we
build communities. Such imagination leads us out of ourselves, enhanc-
ing our capacity to set aside our own particular interests in order to rec-
ognize the needs of others or what would be required for us to pursue a
common ideal. Dewey identifies this power as unfolding in the redirec-
tion of desire and purpose, the first intimations of which are of necessity
imaginative (1987, 352). That redirection of desire and purpose poten-
tially presents us with opportunities to pursue new and different possibil-
ities, opening up what Homi Bhabha calls “liminal spaces,” which are
sites for the production of cultural hybridities (1994). Such imagination
facilitates dynamic manifestations of social agency, garnering the
resources to participate in the production of political, cultural, or ethnic
identities. (This contrasts quite markedly with the conception of identity
as linked to some essential or static entity. On the way in which linguis-
tic community and autonomy of expression are relevant to this process,
see Cornell 2000, ch. 8, and Anzaldúa 1990, ch 5.) Imagination enables
us to better understand how our actions and our decisions affect others,
to see ourselves in-relation-to-others. And it heightens our capacity for
compassion in the sense of feeling with others, what Kundera describes as
“the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional
telepathy [. . . which] in the hierarchy of sentiments . . . is supreme”
(1984, 20; cf. Willett 2001, ch. 7, on erotic power and understanding the
“individual in relationship-to-others”).
Aesthetic engagement potentially activates imaginative resources
that enable the realization of agency. This strikes me as crucial at a time
when it is argued not only that one must become a moral agent in order
to be free but also that one must at least play a role in determining the
means and meaning of that endeavor as such. This is the very predica-
ment faced by the characters of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: they are (even-
tually) “free men” before the law but are at sea when it comes to realizing
how that freedom might meaningfully animate their lives. Lacking what
I describe as the felt quality of freedom—the feeling of themselves as
free—they are without the imaginative resources to envision lives of
meaning and purpose that they might seek as their own (for a similar dis-
cussion of these ideas in a different context, see Acampora 2006).
The experience of the enslaved body generates a mutilated aesthetic.
The theft of slavery commits a dual crime—not merely a theft of the
property of one’s labor, slavery manipulates and disciplines the slave’s

erotic resources to serve the master’s material interests. Bodies whose
senses are anesthetized by an economy that treats them as commodities to
be bought, bartered, and broken by others struggle to see themselves as
human beings with possibilities to be sought, shaped, and shared. They
emerge from slavery with transmogrified desire—the phenomenon of
“slave breaking” bears witness to the necessity of the transformation of
desire in the maintenance of the institution of slavery—and an impaired
sense of the erotic they might otherwise engage in bringing forth beauty,
bringing about a world imbued with meanings and pleasures they partic-
ipate in defining.
In Morrison’s Beloved we encounter a story about a community of
former slaves and their children. Some of them had their freedom from
slavery purchased for them, others escaped, and others were literally born
in the passage between. Part mystery, part history, part psycho-biography,
Beloved depicts the specters of slavery, its perversions of desire, and the
struggle to realize freedom when emerging from a condition of bondage.
It poignantly illustrates the crippling effects of a mutilated aesthetic
resulting from the experience of the enslaved body. Much of Beloved
focuses on attempts (most of which fail) to engage that sense of the erotic
and to become aesthetically empowered. Consider, as merely one exam-
ple, Baby Suggs’ “call” in the clearing in which she endeavors to enliven
those gathered there by a sense of the erotic that is explicitly tied to see-
ing one’s own body as a source of meaning (both loving and lovable) and
value (in social and aesthetic, not merely economic, terms). Such enliven-
ing aims at making a new perspective possible—it facilitates “loving per-
ception,” a way of seeing the world such that one seizes upon and finds
one’s ecstasies in the possibilities of what one perceives.
Shortly following Sethe’s escape from slavery, her former master
finds her at the house she is sharing with her mother-in-law in Ohio,
Baby Suggs. When the master arrives at the house, designated only by its
number “124,” Sethe retreats to a shed. There she decides that she and her
children would be better off dead than be slaves. Before she can take her
own life, the master bursts through the door only to find the baby dead
and the other children lying crying nearby. That she would murder her
own children is evidence enough that Sethe is “tainted,” and she is viewed
as unfit even for life on the plantation. She spends a little time in jail and
then returns to 124.
But things are not the same. Once a place where former slaves met,
laughed, talked, and tried to heal, 124 is now as anesthetic as its name.
Years later the space, no longer invested with the significances of a place,
becomes haunted by a baby’s ghost. The ghost has violent outbursts and
mercilessly taunts the inhabitants until a fellow exslave, Paul D., takes
up residence with Sethe and kicks the ghost out of the house. The ghost
then appears in the form of a live human being. “Beloved” is all crave:
for sugar, for complete attention, for life. We are told that “Sethe was
licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved’s eyes” (Morrison 1987, 57). She had “A
touch no heavier than a feather but loaded, nevertheless, with
desire. [. . .] The longing [Sethe] saw there was bottomless” (58).
Beloved is quite literally the personification of exorcised desire, and she
can find no satisfaction.
Baby Suggs has lost her will to live: “Her faith, her love, her imagi-
nation and her great big old heart began to collapse twenty-eight days
after her daughter-in-law arrived” (89). It is as if at the very moment that
Sethe, Baby Suggs, their family, and their friends finally began to experi-
ence the first moments of genuine freedom—described earlier by Baby as
a kind of self-granted grace—the shadow of slavery darkened the sky.
Before Sethe’s ruinous encounter with the master in the shed, Baby Suggs
occasionally presided over a gathering of former slaves in a clearing in the
wood near her home, issuing a “Call.” The Call is not a sermon, we are
told (177), rather it brings the people together as a community and draws
them toward pursuing a hitherto unknown love. She tells them that “in
this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare
feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.” The love she evokes is a kind of erotic
that would enable them to have the imaginative resources for grace: “She
told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could
imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it” (88–89).
Desiring a route to revaluing their bodies the former slaves laugh, cry,
dance, and weep.
Cynthia Willett, in her The Soul of Justice (2001), describes this event
as a chiefly cathartic moment. I am less inclined to see it as a purging of
something that has been constrictive in the past. Baby Suggs’ “calling” is a
creative exercise or communal practice aimed at the imagination of self- and
communal making; it seeks not a release from the past but a reaching toward
the future. The difference, as I understand it, is potentially significant: the
kind of freedom that would be gained from the removal of impediments or
impurities (as catharsis suggests) is insufficient for understanding what the
meaningful exercise of freedom is. In identifying freedom with a communal
practice as opposed to an accomplishment of a lone autonomous subject, I
follow Willett, but I also think it is crucial to investigate the resources
required to engage such a practice. My argument here has been that these
resources are significantly, if not exclusively, aesthetic, hence my emphasis on
creative and imaginative appropriation rather than purgation. Willett’s
emphasis on catharsis occludes our sight of expressions of desire (and its fail-
ures) to engage a most imaginative and creative activity as it is expressed in
Morrison’s work. It is the dis-orderings and attempted reorderings of desire
that seem most vividly at play in Beloved.
In Beloved, we witness the poverty of aesthetic experience in the lives
of many characters. “Color” literally and figuratively evaporates from
their lives. Baby Suggs, for example, “was so starved for color. There was-
n’t any except for two orange squares in a quilt that made the absence
shout. . . . In that sober field, two patches of orange looked wild—like life
in the raw” (Morrison 1987, 38). After Sethe kills her child and goes to
jail, Baby tells “Stamp Paid” that she’s just going to lay down and think
about color for the rest of her life (177). Sethe does not notice, but color
disappears from her life, too: “[T]he last color she remembered was the
pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl. After that she became as
color conscious as a hen. . . . It was as though one day she saw red baby
blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it”
(39). Being severed from a kind of desire that would enable them to cre-
atively and imaginatively live their lives as free and full of possibilities, the
characters repeatedly exhibit failure and frustration.
Beloved’s characters seem to be disabled in ways that their ancestors,
who were born in Africa but were enslaved in the United States, were not.
What Sethe remembers of her childhood was watching those other slaves
transform themselves, if only temporarily. They became enraptured not
with fantasies of becoming like white people and not with a kind of nos-
talgia that can lead to paralyzing resentment. Rather, transported by danc-
ing and singing, they practiced shape shifting. Sethe recalls:
Of that place where she was born (Carolina maybe? or was it Louisiana?)
she remembered only song and dance. Not even her own mother, who was
pointed out to her by the eight-year-old child who watched over the young
ones—pointed out as the one among many backs turned away from her,
stooping in a watery field. [. . .] Oh but when they sang. And oh but when
they danced and sometimes they danced the antelope. The men as well as
the ma’ams, one of whom was certainly her own. They shifted shapes and
became something other. (31)
It is the capacity to imaginatively project oneself as other—to envision

one’s body as a live, creative, dynamic, and powerful form—that slavery
seems to have stripped from most of the characters in Beloved, and it is

this same legacy the characters of “Spell #7” endeavor to overcome. With-
out such power—lacking a form of desire that authorizes and facilitates
imaginative transfiguration—they are unable to envision a future that
does not resemble the past, unable to sketch before themselves possibili-
ties that differ from the present, unable to give shape to lives that they can
come to think of as their own.
Willett emphasizes what happens when the erotic core at the heart
of a person is assaulted. The cases she cites strike me as ruptures, breaks
in the social bonds. I have focused on what I have characterized as erotic
perversions, the ways in which slavery effects a kind of incapacitating
desire, desire that is organized for hatred and self-loathing (e.g., that
which is exemplified in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and theorized as
ressentiment in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals) or rendered impo-
tent through direction toward the impossible or other-wordly (e.g., what
Baby Suggs explicitly resists and what Beauvoir discusses in her The Ethics
of Ambiguity). The characters of Beloved love—each other, themselves,
and their possibilities—badly in the way suggested by Shange in the epi-
graph to this chapter. Morrison’s and Shange’s works provide profound
examples not only of how we can become severed from the erotic that
draws us into transfiguration but also of how vital it is that we gain access
to that kind of power in order to see ourselves as free, loving and loveable,
and full of possibilities. This is not to say that the characters completely
fail to attempt or even have marginal successes in transfiguration. As an
example of Sethe’s aesthetic revaluation, see her conversion of the scars she
has on her back into “her tree.” Paul D. will see the same as “the decora-
tive work of an ironsmith too passionate for display,” while Amy (the
white indentured servant Sethe meets during her escape) will see the
marks as “tiny little cherry blossoms” (Morrison 1987, 17). Willett argues
convincingly that the modern conception of autonomy is ill equipped to
“protect the person from violations of his meaningful relationships”
(2001, 210). I would add that this includes aesthetic meaning—the felt
quality of experience as such. The aesthetic is the ground upon which,
with which, and out of which the symbolic order is organized, reformed,
and shaped anew. Beloved ends with the collective forgetting of Beloved’s
miraculous apparition and subsequent disappearance (Morrison 1987,
274–75). She is “disremembered,” which calls to mind the difficulties of
“rememory” Sethe experiences. One of the stories “laid down” in that
work and in Shange’s “Spell #7,” perhaps one that is to be passed on, is
the story of Eros (rather than Prometheus) bound, the story that shapes
the many stories witnessed in these texts that mark the binding or con-
striction of the very desire that is necessary for the pursuit of meaningful
freedom.
Making significances and goals appear in the world, discovering rea-
sons for existing, manufacturing joy—these are the goods of the passion,
the eros, that animates human existence. Our acquaintance with these
activities is what the space of the imaginary domain is supposed to enable.
It provides entrée to an apprenticeship in freedom insofar as it serves as a
place that we make our own through the imaginative refiguring of our
relations to others, ourselves, and our capabilities. It is precisely that facil-
ity that is required to make the movements of desire that Beauvoir asso-
ciates with human vitality and joyful possibilities: to see each goal of our
desire not simply as an end in itself but rather as an opening, “a point of
departure” (Beauvoir 1948, 28), to new possibilities. It is what enables
one to cast oneself into the world in such a way as to disclose its possible
meanings and bring forth its desirable qualities. Fanon, Lorde, Shange,
and Morrison explore how such bringing forth, or poiesis, is relevant for
the realization of freedom. For Fanon, the passion Beauvoir describes
needs to be able to burn if it is to sufficiently fuel revolt against the seri-
ous world: it must enable one “to shape a torch with which to burn down
the world” (1967, 134). That flame is to be utilized not simply to destroy
in the name of vengeance or to be destructive for its own sake. Rather one
raises such a torch to blaze a trail out of the serious world that fixes the
significance of “the fact of blackness” and determines the horizon of goals
that follow from it. At the same time, this fire can be used to ignite a pas-
sion that stimulates others to burn. It is the multiple ways in which poetic
power is a propellant and accelerant that I have emphasized in the works
of Lorde, Shange, and Morrison. Loving, in the form of willing, and
authorizing in the sense of creating and sanctioning, are what erotic poet-
ics seek to exercise and make available to others. Aesthetic experience can
draw us into this process and help us make it our own. It provides us with
a tangible experience of the aisthesis— the felt quality—of freedom. Thus
enlivened, we are enabled to claim and exercise our authority as makers of
meaning and pleasure with others and for ourselves.
Part II
Body Agonistes
4
MeShell Ndegéocello
Musical Articulations of Black Feminism
Martha Mockus
To some, god is the light that leads them to believe that they
see and know everything . . . I sway to the pulses of the rivers
of blood that flow through my body, because I believe in
things that you cannot see. I believe in things I cannot see.
—MeShell Ndegéocello, “Akel Dama (Field of Blood)”
The most arousing thing to me is sound. Even the sound of

bodies when they’re touching just wears me out, or the sound
of breath, or the sound of wetness.
—MeShell Ndegéocello,
interview with Rebecca Walker, 1997
What does it mean to “believe in things we cannot see”? How is wetness

audible? In western cultures, sight and vision dominate conceptualiza-
tions of knowledge, power, aesthetics, and sexuality. The epistemologi-
cal power of music (sounding and listening) is often marginalized, cast
in the shadow of visual and literary culture. In American popular music,
bassist/singer/songwriter MeShell Ndegéocello privileges sound over
sight in order to address some of the most critical problems in contem-
porary society. Her daring intelligence and musical creativity render her
one of the strongest voices, male or female, in popular music today, yet
the only published feminist analysis of Ndegéocello (Burns and
LaFrance 2002, 133–67) focuses on just one of her songs (“Mary Mag-
dalene” 1996). This chapter aims to fill a serious gap in the literature
and to highlight the powerful aesthetics created in Ndegéocello’s
remarkable works.
81
82 MARTHA MOCKUS
Ndegéocello’s music is rooted in 1970s funk but also blends stylis-

tic features of soul, jazz, and hip hop. For her virtuosity, musical energy,
and sexual candor many critics have compared her to Prince (York 1993,
Harrington 1994, Seigal 1994, Darling 1994, Powers 1996, Sanders
2001, Jackson 2002), yet she also names Toshi Reagon and Sweet Honey
in the Rock as important models (Rogers 1996, Harrington 1994).
Unlike Prince, Ndegéocello has an audience comprised of mostly young
women of color and queer women; her music is played rarely, if at all, on
mainstream radio. She offers her listeners an unusually politicized musi-
cal experience of sensuality that reaffirms the need for personal passion
and feminist transformation.
In June 2002, Ndegéocello released her fourth album entitled
Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape. Three months earlier in an interview
with Essence she said, “I call it an anthropological mixtape because it’s a
musical excavation of my own journey, one that I hope others will relate
to” (Bandele 2002, 99). In later interviews she explained this more fully:
This record is about digging up our past in order to understand where we

are going; it is about me evaluating my musical journey from [Washington]
D.C. and go-go to being a jazz musician to a funk and soul singer to a hip
hop lover; it is about critiquing the music industry, programmed radio and
my own participation in that industry. I don’t believe in pointing fingers in
one direction, so the album is definitely as much of a self-critique as a cri-
tique. Beyond these themes, I just tried to be funky and collaborate with
amazing vocalists, musicians and icons to create an intergenerational dia-
logue on identity and transformation. (Waring 2002; Cline 2002, 46)
If some of the constitutive binaries of anthropology have been

self/other, civilized/primitive, colonizer/colonized, and speaker/spoken
for, Ndegéocello turns anthropology on its head. Much like the work of
her literary predecessor Zora Neale Hurston, Ndegéocello’s “anthropolog-
ical mixtape” emanates from a cultural insider seeking to explain her own
worldview by locating herself as a black, queer female musician and
assessing the state of black America at the start of the twenty-first century.
Central to her musical ethnography are her political convictions about the
search for freedom and the struggles against capitalism, racism, sexism,
and homophobia in African American cultural history. I want to argue
that Ndegéocello’s music embodies many of the same feminist critiques
offered by Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Angela Davis, and it is
their work that informs and inspires my analyses. I also include the voices
of Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and Cheryl Clarke,
MeShell Ndegéocello 83
whose passionate ideas about economic justice and sexual freedom res-
onate deeply with those of Ndegéocello.
In her groundbreaking book Black Feminist Thought, Collins writes,
“Developing Black feminist thought also involves searching for its expres-
sion in alternative institutional locations and among women who are not
commonly perceived as intellectuals. [. . .] Black women intellectuals are
neither all academics nor found primarily in the Black middle class”
(2000, 14). Collins then identifies who we might turn to as additional,
fully legitimate sources of Black feminist theories and knowledges: “Musi-
cians, vocalists, poets, writers, and other artists constitute another group
from which Black women intellectuals have emerged. Building on
African-influenced oral traditions, musicians in particular have enjoyed
close association with the larger community of African-American women
constituting their audience” (2000, 17). Although Ndegéocello identifies
herself as neither intellectual nor feminist, I welcome Collins’s invitation
to engage her music as spirited articulations of black feminist thought.
Likewise, Ndegéocello’s use of the term anthropological in the subtitle of
Cookie prompts a more imaginative understanding of anthropology: its
methods and goals need not be defined solely by professional academics
in the university. Collins also analyzes the importance of lived experience
and everyday life in black feminist epistemology as practiced by acade-
mics, activists, and artists alike. Similarly, Ndegéocello identifies everyday
life as her primary muse (Waring 2002, Cline 2002, Orloff 2002,
Thomas 2002). In addition to Collins’s framework, bell hooks’ critical
phrase “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”—one she uses repeatedly
throughout her works—is especially useful because it sets up race, class,
and gender as intertwining forms of identity and as interlocking sites of
oppression and resistance.
I.
Since so many black folks have succumbed to the post-1960s

notion that material success is more important the personal
integrity, struggles for black self-determination that emphasize
decolonization, loving blackness, have had little effect. As long
as black folks are taught that the only way we can gain any
degree of economic self-sufficiency or be materially privileged
is by first rejecting blackness, our history and culture, then
there will always be a crisis in black identity.
—hooks, Black Looks
84 MARTHA MOCKUS
In “Dead Nigga Blvd,” the opening track on her anthropological mix-

tape, Ndegéocello fiercely interrogates white constructions of black stereo-
types and condemns the conflation of freedom with capitalist consumption.
you sell your soul like you sell a piece of ass
slave to the dead white leaders on paper
and welfare cases
rapists and hoes
all reinforced by your tv show
exotic and beautiful videos
a jail’s a sanctuary for the walking dead
it fucks with your head
when every black leader ends up dead
On one level, the title of her song refers to the pattern of naming streets—
usually in the ghetto—after Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. On
another level, Ndegéocello includes those “dead niggaz” whose sense of
self and freedom has been killed off by capitalist exploitation and some of
black nationalism’s essentialist notions of black identity. For example, in
the chorus she declares, “you try to hold on to some africa of the past/one
must remember it’s other africans that helped enslave your ass.” In her
essay, “Eating the Other,” bell hooks argues:
Resurgence of black nationalism as an expression of black people’s desire to
guard against white cultural appropriation indicates the extent to which the
commodification of blackness (including the nationalist agenda) has been
reinscribed and marketed with an atavistic narrative, a fantasy of Otherness
that reduces protest to spectacle and stimulates even greater longing for the
“primitive.” Given this cultural context, black nationalism is more a gesture
of powerlessness than a sign of critical resistance. [. . .] When young black
people [today] mouth 1960s’ black nationalist rhetoric, don Kente cloth,
gold medallions, dread their hair and diss the white folks they hang out with,
they expose the way meaningless commodification strips these signs of polit-
ical integrity and meaning, denying the possibility that they can serve as a
catalyst for concrete political action. As signs, their power to ignite critical
consciousness is diffused when they are commodified. Communities of resis-
tance are replaced with communities of consumption.” (hooks 1992, 33)
Assimilation is also a false notion of freedom. In the first verse of “Dead

Nigga Blvd” Ndegéocello claims, “somebody said our greatest destiny is
to become white, but white is not pure and hate is not pride.” This res-
onates with bell hooks’ critique of some of the weaknesses of civil rights’
ideology. According to hooks:
Since freedom for black folks had been defined as gaining the rights to enter
mainstream society, to assume the values and economic standing of the
white privileged classes, it logically followed that it did not take long for
interracial interaction in the areas of education and jobs to reinstitutional-
ize, in less overt ways, a system wherein individual black folks who were
most like white folks in the way they looked, talked, and dressed would find
it easier to be socially mobile. [. . .] Unfortunately, black acceptance of
assimilation meant that a politics of representation affirming white beauty
standards was being reestablished as the norm.” (1994b, 176–77)
Musically, “Dead Nigga Blvd” is a medium tempo funk tune built

on a two-measure groove in the bass and drums. Guitars and keyboard are
used rhythmically for their percussive colors rather than melodically. In
the chorus, as the lyrics move around past, present, and future, Ndegéo-
cello uses her voice as echo, so that each alternating line of lyric is heard
twice. However, we hear the “distant” echo first, followed by the “nearer”
initial vocalization (noted below in italics), which creates a reverse echo
effect—a stunning sonic enactment of rebellion and confrontation.
(while we) campaign for every dead nigga blvd
so y’all young motherfuckers can drive down it in your fancy cars
you try to hold on to some africa of the past
one must remember it’s other africans that helped enslave your ass
cuz everybody’s just trying to make that dollar
remember what jesse used to say? i am somebody
no longer do i blame others for the way that we be
cuz niggas need to redefine what it means to be free
Defying acoustic logic, the jarring effect of her reverse echo challenges the
listener to rehear, rethink, and as Ndegéocello demands, “redefine what it
means to be free.”
At the last line of the final chorus, the music is abruptly redefined as
the drums, bass, and guitar disappear behind the ethereal chords of the
keyboards. (In her liner notes, Ndegéocello playfully refers to this as
“Chocolate Spaceship Keys” [Ndege\ocello, 2002]) We hear a sample from
Dick Gregory’s speech “Human Rights and Property Rights”: “Understand
young folks, when you put property rights ahead of human rights—under-
stand you’re tampering with nature. Hmm. That’s right. You see, property
rights is controlled by man, and human rights is controlled by nature”
(1971). Added effects of wind and upward glissandi on the “spaceship
keys” convey a floating sense of suspension as Ndegéocello leaves us to
ponder the deeper distinctions between the material and the conceptual.
86 MARTHA MOCKUS
“Dead Nigga Blvd” protests assimilation, separatism, the commodi-

fication of blackness, and leaves open this question of freedom. Meanwhile
each of the following songs on the album addresses more specifically the
various shapes freedom ought to take: economic freedom (an end to capi-
talism), sexual freedom (an end to homophobia), spirituality (freedom
from religious dogmatism), and self-definition. But none of these free-
doms can come about without revolution, especially revolutionary art.
II.
MAMA: Son—how come you talk so much ‘bout money?

WALTER: (With immense passion) Because it is life, Mama!
MAMA: (Quietly) Oh—(Very quietly) So now it’s life. Money
is life. Once upon a time freedom used to be life—now it’s
money. I guess the world really do change . . .
—Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
In Cookie’s next tune, “Hot Night,” we hear Ndegéocello’s composi-

tional process informed by her burning desire to reinvigorate the concept
of ‘revolution,’ but at the same time she is fully aware of how easily revo-
lutionary ideas, such as hers, are coopted by the entertainment industry.
“Hot Night” begins with the voice of Angela Davis in an excerpt from her
speech The Prison Industrial Complex: “I was a member of the communist
party. I’m not a member of the communist party, anymore—but I still
consider myself very much a socialist. So we’ll get to that later. One of the
reasons why the war in Vietnam was able to happen as long as it did was
because this—of this fear of communism. And people pointed to the
Vietnamese as their enemy. As if somehow or another, if the country
defeated the communist enemy in Vietnam, things were gonna be okay at
home” (1999). Accompanying Davis is a sample of a two-measure horn
riff from “La Fama” (1974) by Hector Lavoe, a well-known Puerto Rican
salsa singer and bandleader. Musically, the salsa horn sample forms the
groove for this piece, setting the tempo and harmonic flavor and provid-
ing the only truly melodic material. After the second cycle of the horn
sample, Ndegéocello adds hip hop drums and bass line, accentuating the
groove and defining the lower range left open by the trebly brass. In the
salsa horn riff, the last two beats are unmarked—and in that space one
hears Ndegéocello’s creativity as a bass player, filling it in and taking us to
the next downbeat, occasionally punctuated by a well-placed grunt. Polit-
ically, the combination of these two samples—Davis and Lavoe—creates
a sonic realm in which both Vietnam and Puerto Rico are located as sites
of American imperialism.
Furthermore, Angela Davis’s vocal presence functions in two very
important ways. First, her voice begins and ends this piece, forming a
vocal frame around the rest of the music and clarifying its structure. She
initiates the political dimension in global terms (Vietnam), and she con-
cludes in local terms, with her indictment of the devastating effects of
“welfare reform” on poor women in the United States. Second, sampling
Davis also works as a musical tribute to her own long-term commitment
to black women in music, culminating in her book Blues Legacies and
Black Feminism but also apparent in many related articles prior to that
book (Davis 1984, 1990, 1995).
Ndegéocello’s own lyrics examine “the plight of a revolutionary soul
singer” who struggles against a “romanticized idea of revolution/with sav-
iors prophets and heroes” and laments that
we all living in a world built upon
rape, starvation, greed, need, fascist regimes
white man, rich man, democracy
suffer in a world trade paradise hear me now
In the second verse, Talib Kweli (of Black Star) attacks capitalism
head-on in his rap filled with humorous rhymes and clever wordplay, and
performed at breakneck speed. Kweli exposes the commodification of
music and the need to confront a music industry interested only in mar-
kets and profit. Ndegéocello shares this view but knows that working as a
musician—even as a “revolutionary soul singer”—in the larger machine of
commerce is fraught with contradictions. In an interview with Bass Player
magazine, Ndegéocello talks about visiting the plant of a company that
wanted her to endorse their basses. She says that “they wouldn’t send me
one that worked, I knew I’d be their only black endorser, and when I went
down to the plant there were all these older black women doing all the
painting. I know I seem like I’m a fist-in-the-air rah-rah-rah activist, but it
was hard for me” (Leigh 2002, 81). (Mark Anthony Neal also quotes from
this interview but does not a pursue a specifically feminist analysis of
Ndegéocello’s music [Neal 2003].) Likewise, Angela Davis in her work has
documented the recording industry’s exploitation of African American
women blues musicians, as well as their efforts to assert artistic and eco-
nomic control. Thus, in “Hot Night” Ndegéocello creates and shares musi-
cal space with a like-minded activist and revolutionary soul singer pas-
sionately concerned with economic strife. Sonically and conceptually, each
88 MARTHA MOCKUS
woman amplifies and clarifies the other’s feminist voice, especially as we

arrive at the end of this piece and Ndegéocello’s phrase, “soul singer,”
embellishes Davis’s words: “And now of course, that the welfare system has
been disestablished and there are no jobs, so to speak, for women who are
told that if they don’t work, that’s just too bad. They can only get welfare
for a certain period of time and then they have to find a job. Now, they
haven’t had the opportunity to go to an institution like this [college]. They
may not have the skills. Where are they going to find a job? And if they
have children, how are they going to pay for childcare, in order to guaran-
tee the conditions which will allow them to work?” (Davis, 1999).
III.
It was this, Meridian thought, I have not wanted to face, this

that has caused me to suffer: I am not to belong to the future.
I am to be left, listening to the old music, beside the highway.
But then, she thought, perhaps it will be my part to walk
behind the real revolutionaries—those who know they must
spill blood in order to help the poor and the black and there-
fore go right ahead—and when they stop to wash off the
blood and find their throats too choked with the smell of
murdered flesh to sing, I will come forward and sing from
memory songs they will need once more to hear. For it is the
song of the people, transformed by the experiences of each
generation, that holds them together, and if any part of it is
lost the people suffer and are without soul. If I can only do
that, my role will not have been a useless one after all.
—Alice Walker, Meridian
Although a small handful of artists in popular music celebrate queer

sexuality, very few (if any) have directly challenged homophobia. (One
notable exception is Linda Tillery’s song, “Don’t Pray For Me,” which
openly condemns Anita Bryant’s homophobic campaign of the mid-1970s
[Tillery 1977].) Ndegéocello’s “Leviticus: Faggot” rails against parental
homophobia as legitimized by narrow interpretations of Christianity. This
was a song she wrote and recorded on an earlier album entitled Peace
Beyond Passion (1996), a critically acclaimed concept album exploring the
tension between religious dogma and spiritual quest. Leviticus, of course, is
the Old Testament book listing the instructions for religious ceremonies
and ritual cleanliness, including a set of sexual prohibitions. Leviticus 18:22
states: “No man is to have sexual relations with another man; that is a hate-
ful thing,” and the punishment appears in 20:13: “If a man has sexual rela-
tions with another man, they have committed an abomination, and both
shall be put to death. Their blood will be on their own heads.” These are
the two quotations commonly used in our culture to justify homophobia,
violence against queers, and antigay sentiment in general. (Historically,
counterdemonstrators at queer rallies or marches make consistent use of
these two passages from Leviticus, waving them on their signs and banners.)
In Ndegéocello’s song “Leviticus: Faggot” a gay son is violently
rejected by his father, while his mother claims an unsympathetic piety,
praying to Jesus to “save him from this life.” Her other line is “The wages
of sin are surely death.” As Judith Casselberry notes in her insightfully
detailed analysis of the lyrics, “Not only do sexism, racism, homophobia,
and classism permeate our society, they invade our individual homes and
psyches” (1999, 107). At age sixteen, the son is kicked out of their house,
turns tricks on the street for money, and winds up beaten to death. “Fag-
got” is used initially by the father to refer to his son, but later we learn
that the son’s name is Michael. Such naming humanizes and dignifies the
gay man, directing our empathy toward him, while his parents remain
generic—Daddy and Mama—depicting this family tragedy as common-
place rather than isolated or unusual.
Verse 1:
Hey Faggot better run, run, learn to run cuz Daddy’s home
Daddy’s sweet little boy just a little too sweet
And every night the man showed the faggot what a real man
should be
But the man and the faggot will never see
For so many can’t even perceive a real man
Tell me
It’s not that the faggot didn’t find a woman fine and beautiful
He admired desired their desires
He wanted love from strong hands
The faggot wanted the love of a man
Michael’s story unfolds in third-person narration. Ndegéocello’s
vocal performance of the lyrics creates an interesting dramatic portrayal
of each of the parents. Ndegéocello delivers both verses by speaking or
chanting the text. Sung melody is reserved for the mother, and her role in
the drama lies almost entirely in the chorus with her prayer to “save him
from this life.” Ndegéocello’s voice is overdubbed in two-part harmony to
evoke a church choir sound.
90 MARTHA MOCKUS
Chorus:
His mother would pray
Save him, save him, save him from this life
However, at the bridge, Ndegéocello shifts from third-person narra-

tor into first person, adopting the persona of “the faggot” and therefore
aligning herself with Michael’s oppression. At this shift the music also
changes: the texture thins out considerably, the lead guitar disappears, the
groove is less funky; piano and strings are more prominent. Ndegéocello
as Michael asks, “[W]ho will care for me? [W]ho will love me?” The most
remarkable moment arrives in the extended coda (entirely in Michael’s
narrative voice) in which Ndegéocello quotes from and expands the spir-
itual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”:
Swing low, my sweet chariot

Let me rise above my fear
Let me rise above my sadness
Let me rise above my tears
Swing low, my sweet chariot
Let me rise
Let my conscience be clear as I rise, as I rise
During slavery, spirituals were collective musical articulations of

hope and freedom. As Angela Davis, James Cone, and others have
shown, the spirituals utilized the vocabulary of Christian suffering and
redemption to cloak the more subversive messages of insurrection and
escape—messages that went undetected by white slave owners who only
heard the surface-level Christian meaning (Davis 1984, Cone 1972).
Davis writes: “But even when the spirituals were not linked to specific
actions in the freedom struggle, they always served, epistemologically
and psychologically, to shape the consciousness of the masses of Black
people, guaranteeing that the fires of freedom would burn within
them. [. . .] The spirituals have directly influenced the music of other
people’s movements at various moments in the history of the United
States. [. . .] [T]he ‘freedom songs’ of the Civil Rights movement were
spirituals whose lyrics were sometimes slightly altered in order to reflect
more concretely the realities of that struggle” (1984, 202–03). Ndegéo-
cello’s appropriation of a spiritual in the service of an antihomophobic
message continues this tradition, extending the subversive appropriation
of Christian rhetoric and reclaiming this aspect of black musical culture
more specifically for black queers.
Some listeners to “Leviticus: Faggot” will undoubtedly hear a con-

nection to the end of Parliament’s “Mothership Connection (Star Child)”
from 1975, which also quotes “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” Indeed,
Ndegéocello often identifies Parliament’s music as inspirational to her,
especially Bootsy Collins on bass. I would argue, however, that Parlia-
ment’s quotation of “Swing Low” serves a rather different purpose—one
more interested in partying than in protesting homophobia. Ndegéocello
claims that “Leviticus: Faggot” is a reference to Funkadelic’s “Jimmy’s Got
a Little Bit of Bitch in Him” from their 1974 album Standing on the Verge
of Getting It On (Powell, 1996). “Jimmy” is a playful, flamboyant tune
about the unconventional gender traits of a gay man. However, the polit-
ical courage and lyrical-musical complexities of “Leviticus: Faggot” far
surpass those of “Jimmy.”
“Leviticus: Faggot” and other songs I will discuss later inevitably
raise the question of Ndegéocello’s own sexuality. Since the earliest
days of her recording career she has granted interviews with main-
stream newspapers, the popular music press, the African American
press, and the lesbian/gay press in which she has spoken openly about
her relationships with dancer-choreographer Winifred Harris and
author-activist Rebecca Walker. Over the years she has referred to her-
self as gay, bisexual, lesbian, and “a femme in a butch body” (Phoenix
1994, 33). Arguably, such a collection of terms might render her an apt
representative of “queer” and its boundary-crossing inclusiveness, but
to the best of my knowledge, Ndegéocello has never used that term
about herself in public. Instead, she has emphatically criticized the
white male connotations of “gay” (Darling 1994, Charles 1996, Moore
2002, Thomas 2002, Fullwood 2002, Watts 2002). She has repeatedly
complained that mainstream images of “gay life . . . [are] patterned off
of a white gay male aesthetic” (Moore 2002, 42), which is produced
and circulated by popular music, film, and television and which erases
the lives and ideas of queer people of color. In a parallel vein, Ndegéo-
cello has decried the limits of musical categories, lamenting that the
marketing interests of record labels, radio stations, and music stores
want black musicians to fit easily into the genres of jazz, rock, funk,
rhythm and blues, soul, hip hop, and so on (McDonnell 1994–95,
Powell 1996, Powers 1996, Walker 1997, Johnson 2001, Thomas
2002). Ndegéocello is a creative musician and songwriter who draws
from all of these traditions (as do many other artists). The categories of
sexual identity and musical genre frustrate her because they both erase
difference and deny complexity. That said, I am less concerned with a
92 MARTHA MOCKUS
precise definition of Ndegéocello’s own sexuality and more interested

in how she articulates a feminist politics of sexuality (including homo-
sexuality and homophobia) in her music.
IV.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of

self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal
sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we
know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of
this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and
self-respect we can require no less of ourselves. [. . .]
In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept
powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which
are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-efface-
ment, depression, self-denial.
—Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic:
The Erotic as Power”
On the anthropological mixtape, Ndegéocello examines homopho-

bia in yet another context. In her tune “Barry Farms,” homophobia is
rooted not so much in biblical condemnation but in teenage peer pressure
to conform to heterosexual norms even when sexual experimentation vio-
lates those norms. “Barry Farms” describes Shorty, a seventeen-year-old
straight woman who becomes sexually involved with a queer woman,
MeShell, and needs to keep it secret. (Here I use “MeShell” to refer to the
narrative persona in this song, distinct from Ndegéocello as composer-
performer.) Ndegéocello sings from the lesbian perspective, exposing
Shorty’s sexual objectification of MeShell and her homophobic betrayal.
In the chorus, Ndegéocello claims, “She couldn’t love me without shame,
she only wanted me for one thing.” Indeed, according to Shorty, sex with
MeShell is superior to sex with her boyfriend. However, MeShell refuses
to be Shorty’s girl-toy and retorts, “you can teach your boy to do that.”
“Barry Farms” belongs to the genre of go-go music, an off-shoot of
funk that emerged in Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s and was pop-
ularized in the 1980s by bands such as Experience Unlimited, Rare
Essence, and Little Bennie and the Masters. Go-go is typically character-
ized by a “loping, percussion-driven shuffle beat” (Leigh 2002, 46). The
title, “Barry Farms” is the name of a large housing project in a predomi-
nantly black section of Washington, D.C. Thus, in both the song’s title
and the use of go-go music, Ndegéocello essentially locates the drama in
a black urban context, thereby identifying lesbianism and homophobia as

real and relevant to African Americans and making a crucial intervention
into the overwhelming whiteness that has defined much of queer politics
and popular culture in the United States.
The opening bars of “Barry Farms” set up the peculiar tension that
permeates this piece on several levels. First, we hear the voice of Kiggo
Wellman, a virtuoso drummer well known for his work in go-go music,
and it is he who plays the drums and other percussion in this tune. He
introduces the song by announcing, “go go music is party music.” Second,
shortly after Wellman establishes the groove, we hear Ndegéocello’s voice:
a hissing whisper, almost as if she is mimicking the cymbals on the hi-hat.
Her whisper (“slice ‘em on up”), both seductive and ominous, indicates
that we are about to enter a world of secrets. The complexity of this world
is suggested musically by the sharp contrast between the drums and the
harmonic palette. While drums and percussion form the center of the mix,
providing the groove’s energy and elasticity, harmonically, the g-sharp
minor chords are relentless, never straying until the very end of the piece.
As the narrative of shame, betrayal, and pain unfolds, Wellman’s “go
go music is party music” is rendered ironic—this is go-go, but it certainly
is not “party music.” Ndegéocello then shifts into her signature vocal style
of speaking and singing, but later on in the piece’s climactic moment, she
returns to that whisper, this time a cappella, to deliver the words Shorty
cannot bring herself to speak out loud: “can’t nobody eat my pussy the
way that you do.”
In the chorus, MeShell ultimately rejects Shorty, and the power of
her confrontation is marked by the shift from third person “she” to direct
address—“you.” In addition, the strings (a synthesizer meant to sound
like strings) play an ascending melodic line, strengthening that assertion
and in a sense asking us to sympathize with MeShell, not Shorty. The dis-
sonance of that line’s A-sharp against the G-sharp minor harmony inten-
sifies the conflict inherent in MeShell’s confrontation.
Verse 2:
now word had been gettin’ around town that shorty and I
we was a little bit more than just friends
and see, she wasn’t really feeling that
so she stopped calling me
then one day i ran into her
she was hanging out with this young boy that liked to take her
around and buy her things
94 MARTHA MOCKUS
and you know how we like material things

and then she walked over, licked her lips
and whispered in my ear and she said,
“you know i’ve missed you baby”
I said, “cool”
and I said, “tell me, tell me what do you miss?”
she said, “can’t nobody eat my pussy the way that you do”
Chorus:
she couldn’t love me without shame
she only wanted me for one thing
but you should teach your boy to do that
can you love me without shame?
I need you when I feel pain
but now you like to fuck around
In his book, Songs in the Key of Black Life, Mark Anthony Neal dis-
cusses “Barry Farms” (along with most of the other tunes on Cookie),
observing that this song “highlights how even lesbian sex does not neces-
sarily translate into a feminist politics that rejects the objectification of
black female sexuality or resist[s] a heterosexist paradigm” (2003, 19–20).
I agree with Neal’s claim, but he misses an even more fundamental issue:
lesbian sex, enjoying lesbian sex, does not challenge homophobia, let
alone eradicate it. This goes for participants as well as voyeurs of lesbian
sex, hence the long historical tradition of straight men who consume les-
bian images in pornography but could care less about the well-being of
“real” lesbians. Furthermore, Neal fails to acknowledge that in “Barry
Farms,” it is the lesbian voice in charge of the narrative, the lesbian as
active subject who condemns Shorty’s homophobia. When listened to in
this way, we actually hear a very old feminist politics at work in “Barry
Farms,” namely, its function as an “advice song,” a common strategy of
the women’s blues music from the 1920s and 30s (Davis 1998). Ndegéo-
cello initially addresses “all the Shorties in the house” warning them not
to treat other women as their secret girl toys. Simultaneously, she reminds
queer women what they can expect if they become involved with the
proverbial Shorty. In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis
argues convincingly that the public identification of taboo “private” issues
such as male violence against women, the myth of marital bliss, lesbian
sexuality, and homophobia were central to the work of blues women,
including none other than Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. According to
Davis, addressing these issues openly in their music (both in live perfor-
mances and on recordings) was a way of removing them from the secrecy
of the private sphere and exposing them as social problems requiring
political attention, much the way the second-wave feminist movement
would do forty years later (Davis 1998, 28). Similarly, Ndegéocello con-
tinues this tradition of feminist resistance to heteropatriarchy by creating
a space in which she names homophobia as a social problem worthy of
public discourse and asks her listeners to think critically about homo-
phobia beyond the realm of the personal.
Patricia Hill Collins, Evelyn Hammonds, Jackie Goldsby, and bell
hooks have thoroughly documented the ways black female sexuality—les-
bian or not—is always constructed as deviant and excessive (Collins
2000, Hammonds 1997, Goldsby 1993, hooks 1992). Ndegéocello is less
interested in repeating that analysis and more concerned with claiming
subjectivity and sexual agency for black women in particular and for
queer women for whom the scenario portrayed in “Barry Farms” is more
common than not.
The music at the end of “Barry Farms” undergoes a dramatic change
of character. The static, trapped G-sharp minor harmony expands to a
more fluid four-chord progression (played on keyboards/organ) that
moves farther afield, and the bass comes alive, reaching into the upper
register with energetic fills. This change in harmonic motion, timbre, and
groove evokes a libratory transformation—freedom from the oppression
of secrecy—signaled by the message of honesty and truth in the lyrics.
The four-note melody in the keyboards is taken up by the synthstrings.
As the music fades, Kiggo Wellman’s voice returns: “When I play, I watch
the crowd. I watch the women—women party—chain reaction.” Like
“Hot Night,” Ndegéocello employs a vocal frame to mark the beginning
and ending of this piece. The effects are rather different, though. The
samples of Angela Davis are quite lengthy, and the power of her ideas
forms the central source of the political potency of “Hot Night.”’ Well-
man’s brief words seem odd and barely related to the queer emotional
intensity of “Barry Farms.” Nevertheless, the music continues without
pause as this song segues into “Trust,” and Ndegéocello moves from the
pain of homophobic hypocrisy to the pleasures of sexual intimacy. As to
the particular type of sexual intimacy (homo, hetero, bisexual), this song
certainly invites a number of interpretations. While the lyrics alone do
not specify a male or female beloved, and the phrase “you’re so hard” sug-
gests a heterosexual encounter, there is no palpable male presence in the
music. Therefore, I pursue a lesbian reading of “Trust.” (Had soul/rhythm
96 MARTHA MOCKUS
and blues vocalist Maxwell agreed to sing on this song as originally

planned, “Trust” would not sound nearly as queer to me.) Caron
Wheeler, black British vocalist well-known for her work with Soul II Soul,
joins Ndegéocello on “Trust,” and the sound of both women singing to
one another effectively decenters a heterosexual reading of the lyrics:
Verse 1
put your tongue in my mouth
make me wet
run your hands down my back
grab my ass
lay me down
spread my legs
tell me what it’s like
Chorus
inside me
inside me
oh yeah
inside me
Verse 2
you’re so hard
so warm baby
so deep
deep
let me hold you closer baby
i won’t let go
let me stroke you with my warmth
make you come
In verse 1, the lyrics initiate a frank carnality issued as a series of
commands to the beloved who then responds in the first chorus. Verse 2
describes the lover’s perceptions of her partner and how she aims to please
her beloved. The second chorus is elongated, adding an emotional com-
ponent to the erotic in the form of questions and answers:
inside me
inside me
yeah, does it feel good?
inside me
can’t you feel my sadness?
inside me
can’t you feel?
so deep
Here, the erotic double meanings of the words “inside me” and “feel”
express both physical and emotional intimacy.
In “Trust,” Ndegéocello assembles an incredibly sensuous combina-
tion of tempo, timbres, and textures to convey erotic seduction and ecstasy.
The piece begins with a spare accompaniment and sultry pace: a basic drum
pattern that simply marks the beat while a short melodic riff in the key-
boards repeats in each measure. The bass outlines a two-measure harmonic
progression that does not change throughout the song. The harmonic cycle
is enhanced by the piano and doubled on synth-violin in a repeating two-
measure melodic motif that gracefully stretches over the bass line. Though
the notes of this melodic motif fall directly on the beat, emphasizing the
slow tempo, the shimmering piano-violin timbre adds a delicate tenderness
to the overall emotional soundscape. Drums, bass, piano, and synth-violin
maintain the harmonic and rhythmic stability (much like an ostinato)
around which the changes in timbre and texture arise. The magnificent gui-
tar solo (at 3:32), for instance, introduces another timbral shift but lends
melodic cohesion by borrowing directly from the keyboards’ opening riff.
Ultimately, the erotic energy of “Trust” lies in the vocal interplay
between Ndegéocello and Wheeler. Ndegéocello sings the first verse in
her characteristically deep, husky voice, staying mostly in the alto
range. Wheeler’s voice is quite different: lighter and revealing a beauti-
fully florid agility in the upper range. Her performance does not con-
form to the role of “back-up singer.” Even though she sings a smaller
portion of the lyrics, sonically she is an equal partner in the vocal tex-
ture. Wheeler sings the refrain (“inside me”) and embellishes the word
“deep” in the second verse. Both women share the extended second
chorus as they exchange lines of lyrics and Wheeler answers Ndegéo-
cello’s questions:
CW: inside me
MN: yeah, does it feel good?
CW: inside me
MN: can’t you feel my sadness?
CW: inside me
MN: can’t you feel?
CW: yeah, yeah
[etc.]
98 MARTHA MOCKUS
Wheeler and Ndegéocello respond to one another with more immedi-

acy as the temporal distance between each utterance shortens and their voices
gradually overlap, thus intensifying their vocal intimacy. The sounds of
breathing become more audible. The pleasure of the moment is enhanced by
the musical accompaniment’s avoidance of both harmonic resolution and
rhythmic closure. After the guitar solo, Ndegéocello’s voice fades away, yield-
ing to Wheeler, who abandons words altogether and continues singing in
long phrases of nonverbal syllables. The bass and trap set drop out to make
room for an abundant rhythmic texture of maracas/shakers, xylophone, cow-
bell, and hand drums. The passionate intensity of this musical transforma-
tion is breathtaking. Wheeler’s wordless vocalizations join the timbrally rich
percussion to produce a kind of textural ecstasy—a musical jouissance.
V.
Mary Magdalene’s palm leaf to you, dearest whore.

Flash it across your sex back and forth like a
shoe shine rag more gently with as much dedication
while I (and the one you sleep with tonight instead
of me) watch and wait for the miracle
weave it into a cross pray to it
wear it as headband and wristband
tie your ankle to the bedpost with it
tongue of the holy ghost
palm leaf of Mary Magdalene.
—Cheryl Clarke, “palm leaf of Mary Magdalene”
“Barry Farms” and “Trust” are not Ndegéocello’s first foray into the
complexities of nonnormative black female sexuality. On Peace Beyond Pas-
sion, “Mary Magdalene” is an exquisite lesbian fantasy in which Ndegéo-
cello queers the Bible story of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus,
casting her as a misunderstood sex worker completely worthy of dignity,
love, and respect. Ndegéocello not only appropriates the savior role of
Jesus but further sexualizes that role as a black woman openly desiring the
“undesirable” Mary, audaciously subverting a number of oppressive binary
oppositions within patriarchy: white/black, male/female, hetero/homo,
sacred/secular, and virgin/whore.
Verse 1:
I often watch you the way you whore yourself
You’re so beautiful
You flirt and tease enviously I wish you’d flirt with me

Perhaps I’m enticed by what you are
I imagine us jumpin’ the broom foolish I know
that’s not the life you live
You live alone in a crowded bed never remembering faces
conversations
just a body for the lonely
Spend one night with me satisfy me for free
and I’ll love you endlessly
You always tell them you’ll give them what they want
So give me what I want
Chorus:
Tell me I’m the only one
I want to marry you
Tell me I’m the only one
In their extremely detailed analysis of “Mary Magdalene,” Mélisse LaFrance
and Lori Burns argue that in this song “Ndegéocello’s compositional strate-
gies subvert and displace many operative sites of both white and masculine
supremacy” (2002, 134), and she successfully “challenges many regimes of
the normal” (2002, 147). Burns’s musical analysis focuses on “attributions
of power” that alternate between Ndegéocello and Mary. The ground bass,
harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic elements perform important structural
and dramatic roles, but Ndegéocello’s vocal delivery best articulates the cir-
culation of power and desire. Her combination of speaking and singing
works to distinguish desiring subject from desired object, potentially con-
taining Mary in the “fixed” position of other. However, Burns argues:
[T]he musical presentation lends the Other her own potential for dramatic
“movement.” The subject’s reflections are presented in spoken form, while
the Other is presented in an elaborated melodic form. The Other is, in that
context, not in a “fixed” position after all. This second conception of the
Other (imbued with the power of movement) might be understood as a
contradiction of the former image (in a “fixed” position). However, I
would prefer to privilege neither one, but rather to explore the potential of
each and to celebrate the equal distribution of dramatic-musical power
between subject and object that results. I believe that this is a musical rep-
resentation of the revised conception of the sexual “gaze” discussed earlier.
(Burns and LaFrance 2002, 154)
For instance, the text of the sung phrases (noted above in the lyrics
marked in italics) address Mary directly, and the melodic patterns
100 MARTHA MOCKUS
Ndegéocello sings rarely coincide rhythmically with the ground bass pat-
tern, granting an active independence to Mary’s persona and erotic power.
Burns concludes that this “song develops a sexual gaze in which the object
is not only permitted but encouraged to assume a position of strength. . . .
[Ndegéocello] succeeds in creating a distinct subject and object by associ-
ating each with her own musical domain; that is, the subject can celebrate
her own discursive power in the domain of rhythm and meter, while the
object is granted power in the domain of melody and counterpoint.
The musical ascription of power to both subject and object com-
prises a significant revision of a conventional construct, the sexual gaze”
(Burns and LaFrance 2002, 166–67). I agree with this reading, but I also
detect additional dimensions of the sexual politics at work in “Mary Mag-
dalene.” The first emerges at the narrative level—a queer woman’s desire
for a prostitute—and alludes to the “historical sisterhood” between les-
bians and prostitutes. In her essay, “Lesbians and Prostitutes: An Histori-
cal Sisterhood,” Joan Nestle identifies the myriad ways western culture has
demonized women who are lesbians, prostitutes, or both (1987). Likewise,
Evelynn Hammonds historicizes the links between black female sexuality
and prostitution (1997). The discourses of language (especially slang), reli-
gion, medicine and psychiatry, laws and politicians, police and prisons
have historically constructed lesbians and prostitutes as deviant, damaged,
diseased—or not women at all. As sexually outlawed women, their histo-
ries of resistance and survival have sometimes overlapped, particularly in
the creation of working-class subcultures. Nestle and Hammonds each
points out that certain middle-class corners of the feminist movement have
shunned both lesbians and sex trade workers as undesirable others.
Ndegéocello herself has admitted to a certain fascination with sex
workers, and her interactions with them probably inspired her to write
“Mary Magdalene.” In her interview with Rebecca Walker, she says:
What turns me on is if I can get close enough to them [erotic

dancers] so they tell me what they feel when they’re doing that. I want to
know what they’re thinking. [. . .]
When I was in high school, I used to hang out in Dupont Circle and
watch prostitutes. There was always one that I thought was absolutely beauti-
ful. I was fascinated by her demeanor, her rudeness. She was, like, “Come on,
tell me what you want me to do.” And I was, like, Damn, come tell me that!
I guess I’m still trying to figure out why the woman goes to jail. What
about arresting the man? And I always wonder, do they receive any kindness,
or are they just beat to the pavement from giving their bodies? I like talking
to them because I don’t pose a threat to them, and they don’t know who I am,
and that makes for some of the best conversations I’ve ever had. (1997, 82)
In “Mary Magdalene” Ndegéocello recasts both the dyke and the whore
as fully human, restoring their sexual power and agency in a fantasy of
sweet romance. This song is a musical illustration of Nestle’s and Ham-
monds’s observations, this time located in an interracial context.
In addition, I hear a butch-femme dynamic in the two musical
domains of Burns’s analysis. First, in terms of the narrative, Ndegéocello
claims the masculine subject position (and its attendant power and privi-
lege) by appropriating the role of Jesus and reinventing that role as
MeShell, a butch lesbian who desires Mary Magdalene. (Here again I dis-
tinguish between “MeShell” as the narrative persona in the song and
Ndegéocello as composer/performer.) In the lyrics Mary is described as
“beautiful,” she “flirts and teases” and wears a dress, revealing some of her
femme traits. Second, and even more compelling, is Ndegéocello’s vocal
portrayal of MeShell and Mary as butch and femme. As Burns points out,
spoken text and its rhythmic intricacies are associated with MeShell, while
sung text and melodic elaboration connote Mary’s power. I wish to queer
Burns’s analysis further. Ndegéocello performs a butch MeShell by pitch-
ing her speaking voice in the lower range, a vocal space normally inhab-
ited by tenors and baritones. Whenever I play “Mary Magdalene” for stu-
dents, friends, or colleagues, they usually respond to Ndegéocello’s voice
by saying “that sounded like a guy . . . I didn’t realize this was a woman
until she sang.” Her deep speaking voice and clipped rhythms avoid the
effusiveness of melody and evoke a studly restraint in her tale of longing.
By the same token, the allure of Mary’s femmeness is characterized by the
higher-pitched melodic phrases, always sung legato, and—like makeup or
jewelry—made fancier by the overdubbing in the chorus.
The sound of a butch-femme dynamic in “Mary Magdalene” is
meaningful for at least two reasons. First, critical work on butch-femme
has focused almost exclusively on visual components—the sartorial, ges-
tural, and behavioral characteristics of lesbian masculinity and femininity.
These are very important features, of course, if one accepts that lesbian
visibility is intimately connected to cultural intelligibility and political
legitimacy. However, this line of inquiry has muted other questions of
how butch-femme is constructed and/or perceived through sound, music,
voice. Thus, Ndegéocello’s performance in “Mary Magdalene” invites a
reconsideration of music as a significant space of butch-femme desire.
Second, butch-femme has been studied and theorized almost entirely by
white, lesbian writers (mostly academic), yet the larger field (historical
and contemporary) of butch-femme life reveals great diversity. In “Mary
Magdalene,” Ndegéocello joins Jewelle Gomez, Gladys Bentley, Mabel
Hampton and Lillian Foster, Cheryl Clarke, Mildred Gerestant, and
102 MARTHA MOCKUS
many other artists to remind us of black women’s varied and spirited par-
ticipation in butch-femme.
To conclude, I have argued that Ndegéocello employs a feminist
sensibility in her compositional process—how she goes about assembling
music and texts and the sensory effects of her choices. However, she
expresses an ambivalent relationship to feminism. In an interview from
1994, she claims a contradictory position: “I’m not a feminist, [. . .] Fem-
inism is a white concept for white, middle-class women who want to have
the same opportunities as their white, male counterparts. We can fight
our men, or we can fight the system. [. . .] To me, an issue is all the
women—black and white—who are on welfare” (Seigal 1994, F-1). In a
later interview from 1997, when asked, “How do you feel about the word
‘feminist’?” she offers a more flirtatious reply: “I don’t know what a fem-
inist is. If I see a beautiful woman, I stare. Is that not being a feminist?”
(Jamison 1997, 161). Part of the problem here is that “feminism” is not
defined in popular press interviews with Ndegéocello (or with other
women musicians in general), which inadvertently sets up feminism as
something to dismiss or avoid. In more recent years “feminism” and “fem-
inist” are completely absent from popular press coverage of Ndegéocello.
Certainly her rejection of feminism as white and middle class is shared by
many women of color across generations who have encountered racism
and/or classism from white women active in the mainstream women’s
movement or who self-identified as feminist. Yet, many of Ndegéocello’s
concerns about class, racism, homophobia, and the limits of identity pol-
itics are indeed feminist issues. She resists the term feminist but not nec-
essarily the ideals of feminism, especially those that encompass a more
complex vision of liberation and address the differences between women
in productive ways. In this sense, she is in concert with a community of
American feminists of color who understand themselves variously as
“mestiza,” “sister outsider,” “woman warrior,” or “womanist” (Anzaldúa
1987, Lorde 1984, Kingston 1977, Walker 1983, Sandoval 2000). Their
works—as poetry, fiction, memoir, and academic feminist theory—have
clearly demonstrated the need to conceptualize gender and the category
“woman” in terms of race, class, and sexuality, because each of those sys-
tems casts “woman” differently in a “white supremacist capitalist patri-
archy” (hooks 1992). Ndegéocello makes a compelling musical contribu-
tion to this very same project, challenging her listeners to hear the
connections and inviting us to enjoy it in the process and to think harder
about how her music participates in feminist struggle.
5
Portraits of the Past, Imagined Now
Reading the Work of Carrie Mae Weems

and Lorna Simpson
Kimberly Lamm
Carrie Mae Weems’ Mirror, Mirror (1987–88, figure 5.1), from her Ain’t
Jokin’ series, is a photograph of a black woman holding up a mirror that
does not reflect her image. Her face is turned away, and her eyes are cast
downward. Her expression suggests a melancholy shadowed by exhausted
disgust. In the place of her reflection, we see the image she responds to: a
light-skinned or white woman shrouded in white gauze. As if to empha-
size how the mirage of whiteness registers itself in the assumed actuality
of black skin, Weems has photographed the black woman in a sleeveless
night dress with thin shoulder straps, exposing the skin of her arm, neck,
and back, which contrasts sharply with the white gauze and its blurry, bil-
lowing effect. With fingers converging behind a rough, silvery starfish
that stains the mirror’s surface, the woman in the mirror seems to be cast-
ing a spell. Moreover, Weems has reconfigured Snow White’s most famous
lines and placed them beneath the photograph: “Looking into the mirror,
the black woman asked, ‘Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the finest of
them all?’ The Mirror says, ‘Snow White, you black bitch, and don’t you
forget it!!!’” This cruel call-and-response shapes our reading of Mirror,
Mirror and reveals how the mythologies of white femininity produce
visual codes that depend upon racist negations. An image of woman split
along racial lines, Mirror, Mirror corresponds to, but also complicates,
Lorraine O’Grady’s analysis of Western culture’s racial division of the
female body: “The female body in the West is not a unitary sign. Rather,
like a coin, it has an obverse and a reverse: on the one side, it is white; on
the other, not-white or, prototypically, black. The two bodies cannot be
separated, nor can one body be understood in isolation from the other in
103
Portraits of the Past, Imagined Now 105
the West’s metaphoric construction of ‘woman.’ White is what woman is;

not-white (and the stereotypes not-white gathers in) is what she had bet-
ter not be” (O’Grady 1992, 152).
Mirror, Mirror exposes the racism within white femininity’s percep-
tual and cultural syntax. That is, the piece depicts white women’s depen-
dence upon black women for their embodiment of “what woman is.” Fur-
thermore, Weems’s revision of Snow White’s lines reveals the severity with
which this division is policed. While this punitive interpellation
announces and insists upon strict divisions among “black” and “white”
women, the grays and continuum of tones Weems renders in this photo-
graph suggest otherwise. Moreover, it is significant that Weems places the
white woman—not the black woman—on the imaginary side of the mir-
ror. In other words, Mirror, Mirror is not another representation of the
black woman constructed in the cultural eye of whiteness but instead
reveals the image of white femininity haunting the history and self-per-
ceptions of black women. This is how, Mirror, Mirror argues, white fem-
ininity’s proprietary claim to beauty continues to impinge upon black
women’s self-portrayals. Mirror, Mirror exposes grim realities, but the
multiple framings and deliberate constructedness of the image do suggest
the possibilities of undoing, reimagining, and remaking the scene it
depicts.
Less explicitly but no less critically, Lorna Simpson’s Twenty Ques-
tions (A Sampler) (1986, figure 5.2) also reveals how the imbricated ide-
ologies of racism and sexism make beauty the property of white feminin-
ity. Twenty Questions (A Sampler) is a series of four circular
black-and-white photographs depicting the back of a black woman’s head.
The woman in the photograph wears a sleeveless white cotton shift that
falls just below her neck. Shot from behind rather than head-on, the pho-
tographs focus on the woman’s hair. Somewhere between a straightened
style and a natural curl, the woman’s hairstyle brings the cultural symbol-
ism and political resonance of black women’s hair into the work’s ques-
tioning of beauty. The engraved plastic plaques, which Simpson has
placed beneath and between the photographs, are crucial to the multiple
levels of questioning at work in Twenty Questions (A Sampler). The first
plaque asks, “Is she pretty as a picture,” a quaint and old-fashioned ques-
tion, which corresponds to the photographs’ circular shapes and their evo-
cation of a cameo’s antique charm. This slight invocation of charm is
quickly undercut as the plaque begins a series of clichéd questions that
reveal the malevolent racial valences working within the hierarchical
codes of feminine beauty. The second and third plaques evoke the
assumed “innocence” and “transparency” of whiteness; the last two evoke

a racist logic that associates blackness with “soot” and “danger.” These
similes are not presented in a straightforward way, but exactly how Simp-
son critiques them is difficult to pinpoint. Her critique can be located in
the suggestions that emerge from the work’s composition. For example,
Simpson places the question “Is she pure as a lily,” which harkens back to
nineteenth-century ideas about white ladyship, near the work’s center,
directly below the title. This question highlights the moralizing and polic-
ing of sexuality at work in perceptions of beauty, and the placement sug-
gests the question produces and separates the same image of a black
woman without the expressive qualities of a particular face. Moreover,
since each question is set in relation to an image repeated four times,
Twenty Questions (A Sampler) suggests that all questions about women’s
prettiness are basically the same.
Through a deceptively simple compositional arrangement, Twenty
Questions (A Sampler) asks viewers to confront the nexus of racism and
sexism informing habitual perceptions of “prettiness” and “pictures” and
then reflect upon the insidious damage they cause. The back of the
model’s head seems to be a preemptive rejection of such inquiries and
makes answering the questions the plaques pose irrelevant, as it refutes the
conflation of a woman, her image, and an assessment of her prettiness.
Together, the defiant opacity of the model’s head, the anonymity of a
ready-made sampler (which the repetition of the same photograph exem-
plifies), and the set of clichéd, irrelevant questions that cannot be
answered all suggest a sad banality.
When analyzing or responding to the decidedly contemporary work
of Weems and Simpson, portraiture might not come quickly to mind, as
it is often still assumed to be transparent and objective. According to art
historian Benjamin Buchloch, portraiture relies upon “the instantiation of
the subject within a seemingly ‘natural’ iconic resemblance,” and there-
fore can reinforce rather than refute longstanding cultural perceptions
about the individual’s correspondence to visual typologies (1994, 54).
Moreover, the idea that portraiture visually expresses interior essences is
one of the genre’s longstanding assumptions, which dovetailed with ideas
produced by and informing nineteenth-century science. In American
Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender, Robyn Wiegman outlines nine-
teenth-century science’s “newly developed technologies for rendering the
invisible visible,” which made “the visible epidermal terrain” represent
“the interior structure of human bodies” (1995, 31). Wiegman argues this
process of making the invisible visible produced a conception of race as
108 KIMBERLY LAMM
“an inherent and incontrovertible difference of which skin was the most
visible indication” (1995, 31). The exposure of and focus on structures
inside the physical body transformed easily, it seems, into ideas about
character and subjectivity, spiritual depths and psychological interiors. In
her study American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture,
Shawn Michelle Smith analyzes the appearance of the photographic por-
trait in archives thought to be distinct—photo albums of America’s
emerging middle-class and Alphonse Bertillon’s Rogue’s Gallery of crimi-
nal types, for example—to argue that American visual culture of the nine-
teenth century, newly suffused with photography and increasingly char-
acterized by social mutability, “produced a model of subjectivity in which
exterior appearance was imagined to reflect interior essence” (1999, 4).
Both Mirror, Mirror and Twenty Questions (A Sampler) disrupt the
instantaneity of naturalized perceptions and question the process through
which images express interior essences and do so by critically engaging
with portraiture. Calling attention to this engagement places Weems’ and
Simpson’s work within historical frames that exceed the contemporary. It
helps us see how these artists allude to and draw from African American
art and visual culture from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
when the portrait was a prominent tool for asserting the honor, actuality,
and visibility of African Americans. As Mirror, Mirror and Twenty Ques-
tions (A Sampler) make clear, Weems and Simpson are suspicious of such
assertions about the portrait but do not wholly reject them either. Instead,
they analyze how the portrait sutures one’s image to the visual dimensions
of the cultural symbolic; they examine the portrait’s production of and
participation in concepts such as ‘honor,’ ‘actuality,’ and ‘visibility.’ Mir-
ror, Mirror, for example, is not a portrait in any expected sense; it does not
display the portrait’s seamless qualities. It depicts a black woman’s attempt
to see herself in the mirror of femininity’s cultural value and exposes the
visual components of racism and sexism as the impediments to this
attempt by restaging, halting, and narrating their synthesis. Mirror, Mir-
ror re-presents the portrait to depict a paradigmatic moment or stage in
the subjective life of black women as they confront the cultural impera-
tive to embody a negation that will sustain the visual and cultural promi-
nence of white femininity.
Weems and Simpson take portraits apart to work within their codes
and connotations, to reveal their participation in the production of race
and gender, and to expose their tie to cultural concepts such as beauty and
reproduction. In doing so, Weems and Simpson show that portraiture is
much more than the standard visual genre for representing the individual;
it is a significant, often unnoticed part of a cultural apparatus that polices

the codes through which individuals become visible. Certainly portraiture
is not the only genre these artists engage with, and no doubt there are as
many differences as there are similarities between Weems’ and Simpson’s
work. However, I argue Weems and Simpson allude to and grapple with
portraits of the past to reimagine black women’s places in the visual
dimensions of the American symbolic order. This argument places Weems
and Simpson’s work within traditions that precede postmodernism and
identity politics. It calls attention to their work’s continuation of and par-
ticipation in an issue African American art and visual culture of the nine-
teenth and early twentieth century highlighted by necessity: negotiating
between refutation and recognition. That is, because it emerged within
hegemonies hostile to people of color shaping and asserting their visibil-
ity, one could argue African American art and visual culture moved
between rejecting the frame of recognition offered by the dominant cul-
ture and insisting upon black peoples’ place within it.
In the nineteenth century, the human sciences became prominent,
and race was increasingly located in and identified through the body. In
short, the body became racialized in the nineteenth century, and photog-
raphy, invented in 1839, helped to produce and define the body as an
image. Wiegman demonstrates that nineteenth-century human sciences
not only justified white men’s dominant place on the racial chain of being’s
hierarchical scale but also made the visual features of the human body into
a code for identifying race. “[T]he corporeal,” Wiegman writes, became
“the bearer of race’s meaning” (1995, 23). Moreover, on the comparative
scale informing the racial chain of being, blackness was a “feminine racial
formation,” and African American women were placed there indirectly, or
not at all (Wiegman, 1995, 55). Photography, which became a definitive
part of visual culture after its midnineteenth-century appearance, con-
tributed to producing the body as a system of signs and then identifying
the body’s physical signs through the categories of race and gender. While
photographers borrowed poses and conventions of portrait paintings, pho-
tography put the portrait to uses that exceeded its previous, most often
honorary, purposes. When used as visual evidence for the pseudosciences
of physiognomy, phrenology, and craniology, the portrait, or rather, visual
depictions derived from the portrait, became a prominent site for identi-
fying and fixing a person through the visual economies of race and gender.
Despite the portrait photograph’s disciplinary potential, it also offered the
opportunity to place oneself within the frame of cultural recognition.
Wiegman argues that in the twentieth century, the visual “function[ed] . . .
110 KIMBERLY LAMM
as a newly configured public sphere,” and certainly the photographic

reproduction of the nineteenth century inaugurated the process by which
the public and the visual began to tightly intersect (1995, 3). As the nine-
teenth century moved into the early twentieth, sitting for a portrait
became an emblem of one’s participation in the public sphere, and the por-
trait became a site of contestation about race, gender, and its meanings.
Central to my argument is Weems’ installation entitled From Here
I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–96). In this work, Weems
reprints and reframes photographs of African Americans in the J. Paul
Getty Museum’s photography collection, many of which are nineteenth-
century daguerreotypes, tintypes, and ambrotypes. In her re-presentation
of these images, Weems made simple but suggestive choices. She enlarged
the photographs, printed them in a bright but dark red, and placed them
within circular black mats. Relatively subtle, these mediations suggest the
images were, and still are, framed by cultural perception and do not
objectively portray the facts of race, gender, sex, or flesh. They also sug-
gest the signs highlighting the constructedness of images are not always
easy to identify. On the glass placed over the images, Weems has meticu-
lously inscribed words and phrases in Roman capitals; the letters cast thin
shadows over the photographs. These words and phrases are the artist’s
response to the images and name the exploitation the photographs bear
witness to visually. The photographs and Weems’s inscriptions simultane-
ously compose a story of lives determined by slavery and subsequent
forms of racial oppression in the United States. More specifically, From
Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried attests to the denigrating images
African Americans were forced to embody and the insidious work of jus-
tifying disenfranchisement these images performed.
At the opening of the installation, Weems re-presents four of Louis
Agassiz’s daguerreotypes of African American slaves from Columbia,
South Carolina. Agassiz was an anthropologist who became influenced by
Dr. Samuel Morton’s theory of polygenesis (which proposed that the dif-
ferent races were “born” separately) and his vast collection of skulls. He
traveled to the plantations of South Carolina and commissioned Joseph
T. Zealy, a local daguerreotypist, to take these photographs in the hopes
of proving the theory that various races were separate species (Wallis
1996, 102). In Reading American Photographs, Alan Trachtenberg notes
the disjunction between the signs of portraiture in these photographs and
the images themselves, which are “not ‘representative’ . . . of an imagined
and desired America, but examples or specimens of a ‘type’—a type,
moreover, of complete otherness” (1989, 54). To render their adherence
to anthropological types, the subjects have all been photographed naked,

which contributes to the frank abjection of these images and their pro-
duction of “complete otherness.” In the profile photograph of a young
woman, which was given the title Delia, Country Born of African Parents,
Daughter of Renty, Congo (1850), the hint of clothing near the bottom of
the image suggests that she has been told to take off her clothes for the
purpose of this photograph. Analyzing these images, photography histo-
rian Deborah Willis writes, “The taking of the photograph reinforces the
act of physically ‘stripping’ them of their clothes” (2002, 23). Though
these photographs focused on the bare facts of flesh, they drew from a
repertoire of compositional codes. The profile pose used in Delia is an
instance of “the facial angle,” which was the invention of eighteenth-cen-
tury Dutch scientist Peter Camper. “The facial angle” facilitated measur-
ing the tip of the forehead to the outermost point of the lips and was a
crucial tool for comparative physiognomic studies (Wallis 1996, 105).
This daguerreotype shows how the profile view creates visual alignments
between the side of the breast and the side of the face, therefore under-
scoring arguments that concepts of sex subtend the concepts of race and
therefore inform physiognomy’s determinative mapping of the body.
Weems re-presents three other Agassiz photographs: two images of
men and one of a woman. Photographed head on, these subjects look
straight into the camera. In all four images, we see the presence of flesh
and the subjects’ lack of control over the visual presentation of that flesh.
Because they have been reduced to their bodies, the stoic sorrow of their
stares detaches them from the flesh they bear. Willis claims these images
“convey” a “pornography of [the portrayed subjects’] forced labor and of
their inability to determine whether or how their bodies would be dis-
played” (2002, 23). The frontal and profile views, the absence of expres-
sion, and the nakedness were unquestioned conventions in the classifica-
tory projects of anthropology as well as comparative physiognomic
studies. These conventions fostered the purpose of recording, and then
comparing, the shapes and proportions of the specimens’ bodies.
Together these conventions signify the “objective” presentation of flesh
and a clear understanding of its meanings. From the vantage point of the
present—“from here”—it is clear these conventions, combined with the
assumption that daguerreotypes reproduced reality with exactitude, nat-
uralized racist perceptions, proved the superiority of the white race, and
therefore justified slavery. Moreover, these images reveal the powerful
rhetorical and political purposes to which the photograph’s assumed neu-
trality can be put.
112 KIMBERLY LAMM
Weems strikes a delicate balance between questioning the codes of

photographic objectivity and allowing the images to testify to actual occur-
rences with abiding consequences. In her inscriptions, Weems addresses the
people in the photographs with a clear and sympathetic accuracy. Across the
Agassiz daguerreotypes, she writes: “YOU BECAME A SCIENTIFIC PRO-
FILE”/“A NEGROID TYPE”/”AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL DEBATE”/“& A
PHOTOGRAPHIC SUBJECT.” Weems has placed these phrases at the cen-
ter of the images, slightly beneath the subjects’ collarbones. She wants view-
ers to read the images through these words and the categories, institutions,
and practices they identify, and thereby see them as inscriptions with real
historical and material effects. Moreover, the phrases are not distinct but
link the images together into the syntax of a statement as well as a histori-
cal narrative. A key aspect of From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried
is the recreation of a collective subjectivity, and the text’s emergence into
historical narrative is a crucial part of the work’s argument for recognizing
the collective dimension of racial oppression. At the same time, Weems’
address to each image evokes the impact of racial oppression on distinct
individuals. That is, Weems’ inscriptions ask viewers to speculate about the
subjectivities that did not conform to the reductions and denigrations of
racial typologies. In contradistinction to the unfolding of this historical nar-
rative, which weaves in the impact of racism on individual lives, we can see
that the separate photographs and their focus on individual bodies as types
violently exclude the economic and historic terrain from the frame and
therefore do not reveal how the institution of slavery and its derivatives pro-
duced images of the black body for its own purposes. In other words, in
From Here I Saw What Happened, Weems brings historical contexts back to
these images. In his discussion of Weems’s installation Sea Island Series
(1991–92), in which she placed “reproductions of Agassiz’s slave daguerreo-
types” beside “pictures of remnants of African culture the Gullah brought
to America,” Brian Wallis claims, “She saw these men and women not as
representatives of some typology but as living, breathing ancestors. She
made them portraits” (1996, 106). No doubt Weems’s work placing the
Agassiz daguerreotypes within geographical and historical contexts gave the
images depth and actuality, but portraiture cannot be easily distinguished
from images that represent denigrating typologies.
Two images Weems links together in From Here I Saw What Happened
and I Cried—a nude, and a portrait of a young black woman holding up a
white baby—make a compelling statement about the relationships among
images of black women’s bodies, assumptions about black women’s sexuality,
and the history of their reproductive labor (1995–96, figures 5.3 and 5.4).
Moreover, these two images highlight how other visual genres such as the
nude implicitly inform the connotations of the portrait and its depiction of
black women. The nude Weems includes in this series is a vertical daguerreo-
type from 1850 titled Study of a Nude Black Woman and portrays a young
black woman lying on a couch covered with lace. Contextualizing this image
in her study The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, Willis explains
that nineteenth-century viewers assumed a black woman in an erotic photo-
graph must be a prostitute (2002, 51). She also makes a connection between
the work producing the lace and the work the model was assumed to per-
form: “Though this is a machine-made fabric, lace making was lower-class
women’s work, and thus has a symbolic significance as the backdrop on
which [the model] rests. In spite of traditional iconographic meaning, this
lace does not connote innocence, gentility, beauty, or finery” (2002, 51).
Everything in the image suggests sexual availability: the model raises her left
arm up so her hand touches her head wrap and her breasts are fully exposed.
She places her right hand near her vagina as though masturbating and looks
into the distance with a dreamy and satisfied expression. Most important,
the model opens her legs for the camera. Willis writes that “the viewer is
almost between her legs” (2002, 51). Weems has placed her inscription—
“YOU BECAME PLAYMATE TO THE PATRIARCH”—in the space between
the woman’s legs, such that the words impede immediate visual access to the
woman’s genitalia.
The next image in From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried rep-
resents another kind of access to the black woman’s body. It is a portrait of
a young black woman holding a white baby up to the camera. Across the
image, Weems writes, “AND THEIR DAUGHTER,” therefore continuing
and completing the statement etched on the glass covering the nude. The
pairing of these images suggests that the sexual availability displayed in the
nude helps to make the subservience and reproductive labor the second
image attests to possible. Known as Portrait of a Nurse and Young Child
(1850), this image is just one in a series of nineteenth-century portraits
depicting white families or babies with their black caretakers. These images
graphically demonstrate the black woman’s necessary but denigrated place
in the American family’s construction of whiteness. It seems clear that this
daguerreotype was not meant to be a portrait of the nurse but of the baby
she holds. Most likely, the baby’s family has decided to have her portrait
taken in order to memorialize her infancy and place her image within an
actual or imaginary portrait gallery that documents and asserts the contin-
uation of the family’s lineage, and therefore their race. The young black
woman is there as a prop or, as Weems’ inscription suggests, a beloved
116 KIMBERLY LAMM
playmate. When discussing this image as an example of photographic rep-

resentations of mammies, Willis writes, “Sometimes she was included with
the child like a favored doll or pet, as a record of a treasured possession who
held a crucial, albeit limited and sentimental role in the household” (2002,
129). The caretaker holds the baby so closely and so high their heads and
faces align, which stresses the young woman’s subservience to the white
baby. Furthermore, for most nineteenth-century viewers, the sharp con-
trast between the subjects’ skin colors would naturalize and justify this
depiction of subservience.
It is images such as those Weems re-presents in From Here I Saw
What Happened and I Cried that Frederick Douglass probably had in
mind when writing “A Tribute to the Negro” in 1849. In this essay, pub-
lished in The North Star, Douglass addresses racism’s shaping of visual
perception and therefore its manifestation in photographic images. His
statements also suggest that what one person considers a portrait, another
might see as a denigrating image. Douglass asserts, “Negroes can never
have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists. It seems to us next
to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most
grossly exaggerating their distinctive features. And the reason is obvious.
Artists like all other white persons, have adopted a theory dissecting the
distinctive features of Negro physiognomy” (in Willis 1994, 17).
Written just ten years after the invention of the daguerreotype, Dou-
glass’ statement reveals a shrewd and prescient understanding of photogra-
phy’s rhetorical power. Indeed, the portrait photographs accompanying
Douglass’ autobiographies put this knowledge to work, as they argue his
work is authentic and his humanity is actual and honorable. As Colin West-
erbeck points out in his essay “Frederick Douglass Chooses His Moment,”
there are important parallels among the rise of photography, Douglass’
escape from slavery in 1838, and his subsequent career as an abolitionist
writer and spokesman: “His rise to prominence ran parallel with the rise to
popularity of the daguerreotype as a medium for portraiture” (1998, 145).
In the statement above, Douglass not only argues against white artists’ por-
trayals of black people, but argues for the political importance of black pho-
tographers to create and assert images of black people’s participation in
rather than their distinction from the national body.
Douglass’ attention to portraiture reveals it was a crucial site for
claiming and shaping representations, perceptions, and theories of the
racialized body. And Deborah Willis’s scholarship continues to show that
as photography became increasingly available, the portrait photograph
became a tool for composing images of honorable identities, capable of
contesting the racist images that saturated the visual dimension of late
nineteenth-century culture. In the Harlem Renaissance, artists and intel-
lectuals composed portraits of themselves and each other in order to re-
imagine African Americans’ place and stature in American culture, which
reflected ordinary African Americans’ (indeed, every American’s)
increased presence in front of the camera. The portrait photograph
announced a visible presence, a worthy actuality. It attested not only to
the self ’s inauguration into the visibility of the symbolic order but also to
the possibility of shaping that symbolic order.
It is not often noted that in 1923, when the Harlem Renaissance
was emerging, W. E. B. Du Bois urged young African Americans to take
up photography. In his “Opinion” column in Crisis, Du Bois asked: “Why
do not more young colored men and women take up photography as a
career? The average white photographer does not know how to deal with
colored skins and having neither sense of the delicate beauty or tone nor
will to learn, he makes a horrible botch of portraying them” (in Willis
2003, 51). Traditionally, studies of the Harlem Renaissance have focused
on its painters, sculptors, and writers, but a few scholars such as Willis
have begun to emphasize photography’s role in the rich cultural produc-
tion of this period and its contribution to the development of the New
Negro. Willis writes, “Black photographers created a new visual language
for ‘reading’ black subjects, an image of self-empowerment—a ‘New
Negro’” (2003, 52). In this context, notions that the portrait photograph
attest to or verify the honorable truth about the person depicted cannot
be disregarded as simply naive.
However, as visual and cultural theorists argue, positive images of
honor are produced by exclusions and repressions. In “‘Black Is, Black
Ain’t’: Notes on De-Essentializing Black Identities,” filmmaker and writer
Isaac Julien addresses the issue of “positive images” in postmodern iden-
tity politics, but I think his ideas are also pertinent to photographic asser-
tions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “Identity politics in
its positive-images variant,” Julien writes, “is always purchased in the field
of representation at the price of the repression of the other” (1983, 261).
In other words, the production of a positive image is also the reproduc-
tion of a negative image. Positive images repress and insidiously empha-
size the claims of the negative. Because photography has such an influence
on visual economies, it contributes to this logic. In “The Body and the
Archive,” Allen Sekula argues that from its inception, the photograph
operated within the dialectics of honor and repression. With photogra-
phy, and particularly with the photographic portrait, Sekula writes that
118 KIMBERLY LAMM
“[w]e are confronting, then, a double system: a system of representation

capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively” (1986, 6).
While the portrait photograph reproduced the signs of privilege and
stature the painted portrait announced, it also “came to establish and
delimit the terrain of the other, to define both the generalized look—the
typology—and the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology”
(1986, 7). Calling attention to this dialectic reminds us that the recon-
struction of African Americans’ images through portrait photography
implicitly invites surveillance. As Sekula writes, “Photography served to
introduce the panopticon principle into daily life. Every portrait implic-
itly took its place within a social and moral hierarchy” (1986, 11). Com-
parative physiognomic studies, wanted posters, mug shots, documents of
hysteria, and daguerreotypes like those commissioned by Agassiz—the
image repertoire that works to signify the deviant, the criminal, and the
racial other—are the honorable portrait’s continually lurking relatives.
As Twenty Questions (A Sampler) reveals, an important part of Simp-
son’s work from the 1980s involves exposing the portrait as a tool of
repressive investigation. In Three Seated Figures (1989, figure 5.5), Simp-
son examines its conventions of display and the disciplinary work it per-
forms. More specifically, Three Seated Figures shows how portrait photog-
raphy is used to produce bodies of knowledge about the raced and
gendered subject. It also suggests the production of this knowledge has
been a failure: the black woman is not fully visible, and why would we
assume she should be? Whereas Simpson photographed the back of the
model’s head in Twenty Questions (A Sampler), in Three Seated Figures she
crops three photographs of a woman so her face is cut away from the
frame. Both choices defy the quest for knowledge the work stages and
underscore its subtle argument against the objectifying investigations of
the black woman’s body. Over three color polaroids, where the faces
should be, Simpson has placed three plaques upon which Simpson has
written: “Prints,” “Signs of Entry,” and “Marks.” These texts evoke sce-
narios of incarceration and photography (“prints”), victimization (“signs
of entry,” “marks”), as well as the investigative gaze of anthropology. The
seated pose heightens the evocation of scrutiny. On plaques to the left and
right of the photographs, Weems has placed the phrases “her story” and
“each time they looked for proof.” It is hard to tell if we are meant to
think of “her story” in conjunction with or in opposition to “each time
they looked for proof.” “[H]er story” evokes the portrait’s associations
with biography. “[E]ach time they looked for proof ” seems linked to sci-
entific projects that attempt to prove assumptions about race and gender
120 KIMBERLY LAMM
by examining the black women’s body. Clearly, the work associates both
“her story” and “proof ” with a depersonalized image of the body. The title
of the work, and the three slightly different ways the model has posed her
hands, suggest each photograph is distinct. But the same model is in each
photograph, which leads viewers to think that an investigative quest for
“her story,” whatever the form or motivation, produces the same deper-
sonalized image of the black woman’s body. After examining the pho-
tographs Weems re-presents in From Here I Saw What Happened and I
Cried, it is easy to think of Simpson’s Three Seated Figures as an allusion
to nineteenth-century daguerreotypes that served as visual evidence for
scientific assumptions about race and gender, but the piece works against
pinning it definitively to a specific time period. Therefore, Three Seated
Figures might also allude to second- and first-wave American feminism,
its use of black women’s stories as proof of its impact and relevance.
Scholars and art historians are right to claim that Simpson’s pieces
are not portraits, but they have not pursued how her work critically
engages with this visual genre. Analyzing Simpson’s work from the eight-
ies, Kellie Jones writes: “Simpson often provided detailed visual accounts
of the body in her work but denied the strategies of the portrait and the
particulars of biography thought to reside in the countenance” (2002,
28). Writing about pieces such as Twenty Questions (A Sampler), Marta
Gili concurs: “Instead of the eloquence of a portrait, [Simpson] opts for
the enigmatic silence of a character presented from behind” (2002, 12).
Indeed, a characteristic feature of Simpson’s work is a model posed with
her back to the viewer or her face cropped from the photograph. How-
ever, I would modulate Jones’ and Gili’s statements and claim many of
Simpson’s images can be described as antiportraits. Simpson’s pieces work
within and against the codes and conventions of portraiture; they remain
within its frame to question concepts such as ‘eloquence’ and their
implicit roles in the economies of race and gender.
Portrait (1988, figure 5.6), a rectangular, vertically oriented black and
white photograph depicting one side of a black woman’s face, attests to the
importance of portraiture in Simpson’s work and defies our expectations of
the genre. Cropped at each side, we only see the woman’s hair, cheek, neck,
jaw line, and ear. We cannot see her eyes and only a small part of a mask
that covers them. The fragmented image of the mask is a telling detail. It
suggests Simpson has reproduced, but from another angle, a partial and
incomplete vision of this young woman that does not see or consider her
eyes. Instead of the eye, the focus of this portrait is the woman’s ear; it is the
only physical feature we are allowed to see completely and connects to the
122 KIMBERLY LAMM
statement Simpson has included at the bottom of the photograph: “THEY

TRIED TO WHISPER SWEET NOTHINGS.” In the context of Simpson’s
severely cropped image, this line suggests a pernicious or violent seduction
and perhaps alludes to Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(1861), in which a slave master and his jealous mistress alternately whisper
threats and seductions to a young black girl while she works and sleeps.
Naming this piece Portrait is ironic, as all of the formal choices Simpson
makes refuse the fullness and completion normally associated with the
genre. Simpson aligns portraiture with the insidious invasiveness suggested
in the text, and her compositional choices seem to reflect a young woman’s
strategies for defending herself against the proprietary gaze of racism and
sexism as well as mimic the dissecting, fragmentary effects of that gaze.
Stereo Styles (1988, figure 5.7), a set of antiportraits, continues
Simpson’s scrutiny of beauty by revealing the portrait’s repressive role in a
culture that implicitly links whiteness, femininity, and beauty. Stereo Styles
consists of ten polaroid prints and ten plastic plaques inscribed with
adjectives that seem to be gleaned from fashion magazines or hairstyle cat-
alogs: “Daring, Sensible, Severe, Long & Silky, Boyish, Ageless, Silly,
Magnetic, Country Fresh, Sweet.” Simpson has inscribed these adjectives
in a hyperbolically and stereotypically feminine script and placed the
plaques in a horizontal line set between the photographs, creating two sets
of five images. Like Twenty Questions (A Sampler) the model is posed with
her back to the camera, which makes her hair the focus. Each photograph
depicts a different hairstyle. Except for a portrait of a neat bun, these hair-
styles are messy and haphazard. Stereo Styles suggests that at some point
the woman straightened her hair, and the images document various
attempts to manage the effect of straightening. Each strand of the
woman’s black hair stands out sharply against the photographs’ white
backgrounds, which in turn reverberate with the whiteness of her dress,
the ribbons in her hair, and the feminine script inscribed into black plas-
tic plaques. Simpson has deliberately sculpted some of the hairstyles to
signify messiness. In one photograph, daisies hang from strands of limp
hair. Juxtaposed against the set of adjectives, these photographs critique
the prevalence and ubiquity of white standards of beauty; their insidious
presence in the language of “style.” The “stereo” of the title of course refers
to stereotypes but also alludes to the splits and doubles at work in this
piece. As with Twenty Questions (A Sampler), Stereo Styles represents a dis-
junction between the images and texts, and the gendered dimension of
racial categories—the implicit whiteness of femininity—produces this
disjunction.
124 KIMBERLY LAMM
The time, effort, and expense of straightening black women’s hair

makes it an issue that intersects race and class, and an analysis of Simp-
son’s antiportraits would be incomplete without attention to those high-
lighting the economic dimensions of black women’s cultural visibility. In
this context, Stereo Styles suggests black women’s efforts to conform to the
standards of a neat, presentable appearance required for getting and keep-
ing a decent paying job. In Five Day Forecast (1988, figure 5.8), Simpson
places the words for each day of the work week in stark capital letters
where a woman’s face should be. Below the photographs of the woman’s
torso and her strong, defined, and defiantly crossed arms is a linked chain
of “misses”: “misdesription, misinformation, misidentify, misdiagnose,
misfunction, mistranscribe, misremember, misgauge, misconstrue, mis-
translate.” Her pose communicates strength, but the image seems cir-
cumscribed by both the list of mistakes and the days representing the
workweek. Is she linked to a series of mistakes because of economic neces-
sities? Does Five Day Forecast ask us to think of the anger and disap-
pointment that must be excised from a black woman’s countenance dur-
ing the week? Or does it reflect back mistaken perceptions of that
countenance? What time and place do the image and its connotations of
work allude to? Though the shift she wears is not necessarily time specific,
it may refer to simple garments women wore during slavery, therefore
provoking viewers to reflect on images of the past in their perceptions of
the present.
The work of literary critic Hortense Spillers illuminates how the his-
tory of race and gender in America shapes the present and therefore helps
us map the complicated historical and ideological terrain Weems and
Simpson engage with to refute. In her well-known essay, “Mama’s Baby,
Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Spillers reluctantly but
strategically identifies herself through a series of names that encircle the
body and identity of the black woman: “Peaches,” “Brown Sugar,” “Sap-
phire,” “Earth Mother,” “Granny,” and “Black Woman at the Podium,”
among others (Spillers 2003, 203). Using the first-person pronoun
metonymically to mark the presence of a diverse collectivity negated and
simplified by American culture, Spillers writes from both outside and
inside the narrow space these names afford to remark on their concatena-
tion of meanings: “I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting
ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetori-
cal wealth” (2003, 203). Spillers draws attention to the thick ideological
bulk of these ready-made identities, the quickness of their transmission,
and the immediacy of their recognition. These names, which “isolate
126 KIMBERLY LAMM
overdetermined nominative qualities,” are, according to Spillers,

“[e]mbedded in bizarre axiological ground, they demonstrate a sort of
telegraphic coding; they are markers so loaded with mythical preposses-
sion that there is no easy way for the agents buried beneath them to come
clean” (2003, 203).
Spillers’ claim that black women are “embedded in bizarre axiolog-
ical ground” offers a compelling place from which to read Weems’ and
Simpson’s work. For an inveterate image repertoire dense and empty from
overuse accompanies the chain of names Spillers cites; these images accel-
erate the instantaneous “telegraphing” of these names, compound the
density of their “mythical prepossession,” and strengthen their capacity to
“bury.” Coming clean from the burden of embodying the underside of
cultural hierarchies is not easy but is also not impossible. It requires an
investigative excavation into the fossilized histories of cultural perception
and what Spillers describes as “marvels of my own inventiveness” (2003,
203). Marvels of aesthetic invention and cultural investigation, the work
of Weems and Simpson reveal how words and images bind together to
create, disseminate, and solidify overdetermined meanings that define and
deplete the bodies and identities of African American women. Their work
inhabits and rearticulates the various ways in which black women embody
what Spillers names “the paradox of non-being,” a being interpellated and
produced to mirror the subjectivity, validity, and actuality of others
(“Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” 2003, 154).
This “paradox of non-being” is intimately tied to pervasive myths
about black women’s sexuality. The black woman is Western culture’s sex-
ual emblem but has all too often been denied the possibility of negotiat-
ing or inventing the terms of her sexual agency. In the chapter “Inter-
stices: A Small Drama of Words,” Spillers renders a spectacle of enforced
passivity and drained potentiality: “[B]lack women are the beached
whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting
their verb” (Spillers 2003, 153). Unreflective strains of American femi-
nism have contributed to this history of invisibility, repression, and
exhausted arrest. As Spillers writes, “Across the terrain of feminist
thought, the drama of sexuality is a dialectic with at least one missing
configuration of terms” (2003, 153).
Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974–79) revealed the sexuality of
black women is the visual and discursive “interstice” in American femi-
nism and feminist art practice of the 1970s. A monumental project of
recovery, Chicago’s installation commemorated women’s reproductive
labor and collectivity by creating place settings for thirty-nine women of
historical stature or mythological resonance. At a large triangulated table

made of glimmering tiles inscribed with women’s names, Chicago and her
collaborators set places for women with ceremonial placemats adorned
with elaborate needlework; each woman was represented at her designed
place with a brightly colored plate sculpted into an idiosyncratically ren-
dered vulva—except for Sojouner Truth. The former slave who famously
inquired “Ain’t I a Woman?” at an 1851 women’s convention in Akron,
Ohio, and therefore placed the implicit identity of the American women’s
movement—“white ladyship”—into question, was represented with three
portraits of her face, not her vulva. At a table validating women’s collec-
tive ambitions and individual appetites, this portrait not only denies
Truth’s sexuality and sexual agency, it also brackets off blackness within a
paradigmatic construction of woman. Dinner Party’s visual and physical
substitution quite explicitly demonstrates Spillers’ claim that the myth of
black women’s sexuality is the inverse mirror of her traumatic desexual-
ization, her “symbolic castration” (2003, 157). Vividly and cogently,
Spillers explains: “The black-female-as-whore forms an iconographic
equation with black-female-vagina-less, but in different clothes, we might
say. . . . Thus, the unsexed black female and the supersexed black female
embody the very same vice, cast the very same shadow” (2003, 164).
Chicago’s desexualized image of Truth unwittingly reproduced but
also exposed the racism and sexism of feminism’s first wave. In the pre-
ceding paragraph, I noted Sojourner Truth is famous for her 1851 speech
at a woman’s convention in Akron, Ohio. She is also known for bearing
her breast in 1858 in Indiana. These two events are often conflated into
one emblematic scene. Historian Nell Irving Painter explains: “In the
post-1960s, post-Black power era of the late twentieth century, a fictive,
hybrid cameo of these two actions presents an angry Sojourner Truth,
who snarls, ‘And ain’t I a woman?’ then defiantly exhibits her breast”
(1994, 464). Moreover, that famous line does not exist in the historical
records. In her essay “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth’s Knowing and
Becoming Known,” Painter argues this emblem of Truth, which “works
metonymically as the black woman in American history,” is a “figurative
construction” satisfying the need to imagine a “straight talking, authentic,
unsentimental” black woman (1994, 464). The appropriations of white
abolitionists such as Francis Dana Gage and Harriet Beecher Stowe as
well as Truth’s own skilled self-promotion as a preacher fostered this con-
struction. Painter writes that Gage and Stowe “sought to capture [Truth]
in writing,” and Truth’s illiteracy made her vulnerable to their attempts
(1994, 471). In the context of Gage’s transcription of Truth’s 1851
128 KIMBERLY LAMM
speech, Painter writes, “The disjuncture between self-representation and

representation at the hands of others creates unexpected complications”
(1994, 470). While Truth couldn’t read or write, she became not only lit-
erate but proficient in the language of portrait photography. Painter reads
the “writing” in Truth’s own portrait photographs, which she sold to sup-
port herself, as evidence of Truth’s skilled use of the informational systems
of her time, a statement of “literal embodiment,” and her entrance into
history (1994, 488). “[F]or she used photography,” Painter writes, “to
embody and empower herself, to present the images of herself that she
wanted remembered” (1994, 462). Truth’s portraits vividly support
Willis’ claim that even in the nineteenth century, portrait photography
gave African Americans the opportunity to fashion images of themselves
for themselves. Weems and Simpson draw from but also complicate the
portrait as a site of self-fashioning.
Isolated and immediately recognizable images “telegraphing”
assumptions about black women’s sexuality (or lack thereof ) marshal
against the possibility that black women can possess sexual agency. In
Untitled (Kitchen Table Series) (1990), Weems disputes this telegraphing
process by placing representations of a black woman’s sexuality within a
visual and literary narrative. Untitled (Kitchen Table Series) is a photo essay
that tells the story of a black woman’s life from the vantage point of one
solid place, the kitchen table. In this series, the kitchen table is a stage for
representing the story of a strong, politicized black woman approaching
midlife and moving through a resonant but difficult relationship. In the
texts, Weems draws from different discourses and styles to highlight the
various ways in which the central protagonist expresses her desires, repre-
sents herself, and lives her life. Often, these discursive layers do not seem
to synthesize into completion, and that is part of Weems’ point. The black
and white photographs, spare but dramatically lit, do not illustrate the
narrative but contribute another layer to this multivalent portrayal. After
a poetic description of their meeting—“They met in the glistening twin-
kling crystal light of August/September sky”—the piece articulates the
protagonist’s view of monogamy: “She felt monogamy had a place but
invested it with little value. It was a system based on private property, an
order defying human nature.” Between these texts is a black-and-white
photograph of a black woman and man at a kitchen table entitled Unti-
tled (Man Smoking) (1990). The couple plays cards and look at each other
intensely. The man smokes; the woman’s hand curls over her mouth, a
gesture accentuating the sexually alive expression in her eyes. On the wall
behind this couple, through the smoke, is a poster of Malcolm X, fist
raised and finger pointed, which brings a political dimension to this sub-
tle representation of a black woman’s sexuality.
Untitled (Kitchen Table Series) tells the story of this relationship
through a series of deliberately staged photographs that draw from a vari-
ety of visual genres. Plate 34, Untitled (Woman standing alone), is a por-
trait: the protagonist leans across the table with her arms outstretched and
looks straight into the camera; her gaze is strong but friendly. In the next
photograph, Untitled (Woman feeding bird), the woman stands in a night-
gown with laced seams and edges, feeding a bird. She faces the left wall of
the kitchen, and the photograph depicts the profile of her body. Untitled
(Nude), which appears after Untitled (Woman standing alone) and Unti-
tled (Woman feeding bird), is not a typical nude, as it works against the
visual genre’s objectifying displays and its signature concessions to
voyeurism. The bright overhead lamp highlights her skin and the shapes
of her features. She is nude, as the title tells us, but since she sits between
the table and the chair, we see only parts of her body: her face and its
closed eyes, the upraised arm bent at the elbow and holding her head, her
collarbones and the tops of her breasts. Her back is arched, and below the
table’s edge we can see just a part of her open thighs. Her body is not fully
exposed, but it is not veiled either. Focused, alone, and satisfied, every-
thing suggests the woman is masturbating. Weems’ choice to leave the
room bare, without the birdcage, playing cards, quilts, newspapers,
posters, drinking glasses, and mirrors that serve as narrative props in the
other photographs, makes the woman’s sexuality the undeniable focus of
the image. While formal choices contribute to the honest self-assurance
of Untitled (Nude), the images preceding it—Untitled (Woman standing
alone) and Untitled (Woman feeding bird)—inform and support its con-
notations of strength. Part of a multivalent portrait that develops in nar-
rative time and through a shifting set of discursive registers, Weems uti-
lizes many formal and thematic factors that work against reading Untitled
(Nude) as a discrete image that reduces an image of a black woman to a
sexual emblem. One of these strategies is to consciously place the nude’s
evocation of sexuality in relation to, rather than repressively distinct from,
the portrait’s assertion of presence, honor, and strength.
Simultaneously oversexing or desexing the bodies of African Amer-
ican women makes their participation in biological reproduction a site for
political debate, scrutiny, and surveillance. In her 1989 piece Untitled
(Prefer, Refuse, Decide) (1989, figure 5.9), Simpson quietly alludes to
assumptions about and connotations of African American women’s repro-
duction, evoking but not explicitly referring to racist and sexist practices
marking its history: forced sterilization, the forced reproduction under-

pinning the U.S. slave economy, and the spectacle of the welfare mother.
Untitled (Prefer, Refuse, Decide) consists of three color polaroids, cropped
at the shoulders and just below the pubic area, which depict the middle
area of a woman’s body. We do not see the portrayed woman’s face, only
her arms, the uppermost part of her chest, and the unassuming white shift
she wears. Three plastic circular plaques, inscribed with the verbs “prefer,”
“refuse,” and “decide,” have been placed at the woman’s abdomen.
Together these verbs and their placement suggest reproductive agency and
choice, yet the plaques, placed against the white dress, are difficult to
read. This subtle element, combined with the depersonalizing cropping of
the photographs, makes the verbs’ connection to agency weak, barely pre-
sent, not fully actual. But Untitled (Prefer, Refuse, Decide) does more than
argue that black women’s agency is not considered when women’s repro-
duction is at issue. In the central photograph, the plaque inscribed with
“refuse” has been placed above the woman’s ceremoniously crossed hands.
“Refuse” is the most defiant of the three verbs, but the pose is almost
demure, as if to suggest African American women’s strategies of refusal
have been subtle by necessity. What does the woman refuse? Since
“choice” is absent from the set of words, perhaps the piece refuses more
than the most explicit marks of victimization I have alluded to above, but
the words and ideas through which women’s reproductive rights have
been imagined. Perhaps Untitled (Prefer, Refuse, Decide) argues the bodies
of black women have been fantasmatically constructed as one deperson-
alized, easily reproducible body that represents the limits of women’s
reproductive choices.
The plaque placed in the central photograph of Untitled (Prefer,
Refuse, Decide) announces a primary strategy of Simpson’s work: refusal.
In the previous paragraph I read the work’s complicated engagement with
ideas and assumptions about black women’s reproduction, but this read-
ing relies upon an analysis of what Untitled (Prefer, Refuse, Decide) refuses
most explicitly—the portrait photograph, its expression of interiority, and
its assumed objectivity. Cropping these images to exclude the face is an
act of refusal that contributes to the eerie anonymity of these images;
placing the clear plastic plaques inscribed with words in the photographs
comments on the assumed transparency of photography (and perhaps
language as well). Art historian John Tagg argues that the photograph’s
rhetoric can be located in its transparency, and reading this rhetoric
requires detachment. Many visual theorists and historians of photography
have made similar arguments, but the following statement from Tagg’s
132 KIMBERLY LAMM
study The Burden of Representation reveals how closely photography and

portraiture intertwine. Tagg writes that “the transparency of the photo-
graph is its most powerful rhetorical device. But this rhetoric also has a
history, and we must distance ourselves from it, question the naturalness
of portraiture and probe the obviousness of each image” (1993, 35). By
simultaneously questioning portrait photography and addressing assump-
tions about black women’s reproduction, Simpson reveals the complicated
connections among portraiture, bloodlines, and genealogies.
Weems’ Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84) also refutes denigrat-
ing perceptions of black women’s reproduction but with less defamiliariz-
ing strategies. In Family Pictures and Stories, Weems assembles family
snapshots and stories to offer evidence of the normalcy, resonance, and
complexity of African American familial and cultural life. Weems pro-
duced this photo essay in response to the infamous Moynihan report enti-
tled The Negro Family, which attempted to document the “crisis” in the
African American family and blamed this supposed crisis on its matriar-
chal history. In Weems’ construction of a family album, viewers see men,
women, and children participating in the scenarios of their lives, which
are not thoroughly determined by racial politics or crisis. Resisting a
cleanly composed aesthetic, Weems’ 35 mm photographs honor the
women in this family but do not commemorate them, so the women are
not abstracted away from the everyday textures of material conditions. In
other words, Family Pictures and Stories resists heroicizing African Ameri-
can women and placing their images in isolated frames. Plate 7, entitled
Van and Vera with Kids in the Kitchen (1978–84, figure 5.10) portrays two
women, the narrator’s sisters, conversing in a kitchen. In the space
between them are three bustling, animated girls, an open refrigerator, and
a window with small flowerpots on the windowsill. The woman on the
left holds a baby with a bottle in her arms; her hand, gesturing while she
talks, creates a blur in the photograph. Van and Vera with Kids in the
Kitchen captures a typical moment of crowded kitchen chaos. In the text,
the narrator reflects upon the ease of her sisters’ intimacy and the agility
with which they balance their identities as mothers and autonomous
adults: “It amazes me that even in the midst of a bunch of crazy kids, my
sisters still manage to carry on a half-way decent conversation. I’m really
impressed.”
Similar to Untitled (Kitchen Table Series), Family Pictures and Stories
uses the narrative elements of the photo essay to bring depth and complex-
ity to visual depictions of African Americans. Family Pictures and Stories is
an insider’s view of African American family life, not the objectifying
134 KIMBERLY LAMM
inscription of sociology that reads images through its own assumptions,

narratives, and conclusions. Yet the photographs are not staged as redemp-
tive celebrations that portray African American culture in a “positive” light.
They are not what Julien describes as positive images that are “purchased in
the field of representation at the price of the repression of the other” (1983,
261). However, they do not foreclose the issues “positive images” raise, their
continual appeal when one lives in a culture subtended by assumptions
about the superiority of whiteness. About Family Pictures and Stories, critic
and curator Thelma Golden writes, “Weems delved head-on into the slip-
pery territory of positive and negative images, making clear the passion and
dexterity necessary to avoid the facile aspect of this paradigm” (1998, 31).
Though they work within “the slippery territory of positive and negative
images” quite differently, neither Weems’ nor Simpson’s work can be
reduced to the well-intentioned but ultimately flawed act of substituting
positive for negative images.
By engaging with portraiture, Weems and Simpson reveal that con-
testing negative perceptions of the black woman is one of their concerns.
They approach this work cautiously, however, and the layering of words
and images is part of this work’s negotiation within this “slippery territory
of positive and negative images.” Both Weems and Simpson include text
within the portrait’s frame to shape viewers’ responses to and perceptions
of images. Distinct but inextricable within the textures of cultural embed-
dedness, Weems and Simpson separate the words and images that
together form the wires of “telegraphic coding” Spillers describes. Text,
their work shows, has the potential to transform automated perceptions
into interpretive readings. These readings are not didactic but instead call
attention to the stubborn and complicated imbrications of race and gen-
der in cultural perception. Phrases, words, names, and narratives inter-
rupt, in Wiegman’s words, “the security of the visual as an obvious or
unacculturated phenomenon,” which therefore undermines the security
of race and gender as visible, knowable, and identifiable categories (1995,
24). In turn, images call attention to the imaginaries that accompany
particular words, phrases, and narratives. These strategies of juxtaposi-
tion unsettle the conflation of image, sex, race, and skin and therefore
work against the black woman’s body “reduc[tion] to mere spectacle”
(hooks 1992, 62). Using language to call attention to the construction
of spectacles, which in this case are one dimensional, easily recogniz-
able, and culturally pervasive images, Weems’ and Simpson’s work reveal
the mechanisms for creating and repressing the constitutive underside
of positive images. Since “positive” images of womanhood and femi-
ninity are often still implicitly white, this is crucial to the work of recon-
figuring how black women are perceived.
In visual art, the inclusion of text is a sign of the contemporary. Bar-
bara Kruger composes designs mimicking the interpellating shouts of
advertising. Mary Kelley creates installations in which text enacts the con-
struction of the psychoanalytic subject. Adrian Piper’s text-based work
provocatively challenges viewers’ assumptions about skin color, race, and
violence. Kruger, Kelley, and Piper are just three of many contemporary
visual artists, who, like Weems and Simpson, utilize text to reveal layers of
ideological meanings. Martha Jane Nadell’s study Enter the New Negroes:
Images of Race in American Culture (2004) shows that the intertwining of
text and image is not exclusive to contemporary art practices. Following
W. J. T. Mitchell’s argument that questions of power and concepts of dif-
ference “surfac[e] within the word/image problem,” Nadell analyzes what
she describes as “interartistic” work from the Harlem Renaissance (2004,
7–8). “Word and image,” Nadell writes, “tell part of the story of how
images of race shifted during the first half of the twentieth century in
response to earlier images and cultural shifts” (2004, 9). “[O]ther images”
include mammies, Uncle Toms, and Sambos: stereotypes that proliferated
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In response,
Harlem Renaissance writers, artists, and intellectuals took it upon them-
selves to bust open these stubborn distortions and assert new truths about
African Americans. They were keenly aware of how images of blacks in
visual culture “were paramount in codifying ideas of race” (Nadell 2004,
17). Examining works such as Alain Locke’s The New Negro: An Interpre-
tation (1925), the magazines Survey Graphic (1925), Fire!!! (1926), and
Harlem (1928), Nadell shows how Harlem Renaissance writers, artists, and
intellectuals “attempt[ed] to formulate—through word and image—new
ways of imagining African American identity” (2004, 36). Directing per-
ceptions of and reactions to images through text, these works reveal a sen-
sitive attentiveness to the fact that in illustrated versions of novels such as
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), “[t]he text and illustrations buttress each other”
and therefore help to “claim authenticity and authority for the depictions
of African Americans” (Nadell 2004, 28).
Because photographic portraits were thought to depict the physical
appearance of a person as she appeared to the naked, physical eye, it was
a tool for re-claiming “authority,” “authenticity,” and the moral conno-
tations of both. An advertisement for the photogravures of C. M. Battey,
which appeared in the December 1915 issue of The Crisis magazine,
foreshadows portrait’s place in the Harlem Renaissance’s construction of
136 KIMBERLY LAMM
personal, cultural, and political pride. It also reveals the work text per-
forms framing, shaping, and emphasizing visual arguments. In this par-
ticular advertisement, Battey sells a set of photogravures entitled Our
Heroes of Destiny, which features portrait images of Frederick Douglass,
John M. Langston, Blanche K. Bruce, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and
Booker T. Washington. Below these images the advertisement cites the
words of cultural and civic leaders who stress the importance of Our
Heroes of Destiny. The words of Rev. Dr. Reverdy C. Ransom reveal a
lot about the values assumed to be inherent in the portrait images of
leading African American men: “Your splendid production of ‘Our
Heroes of Destiny’ marks the era of perpetuating characteristic and faith-
ful likeness of the famous men and women of our own race, to be
handed down to younger generations, inspiring them with ideals which
if carefully nurtured in their young lives will in their mature ages prove
excellent examples of pure and dignified manhood and womanhood”
(Willis-Thomas 1985, n.p.).
Though the photogravures (lithographs modeled on photographs)
of these leaders connote honor, dignity, and vision, the text adds another
layer of rhetorical emphasis. It tells readers how to see and identify with
the images. Certainly using text and image in tandem for the purposes of
reinforcing messages is a strategy of advertising and emerged out of
changes in printing technology that allowed for the easy reproduction of
images in printed texts (Nadell 2004, 17). However, this advertisement
also reveals the recuperative roles text and image played reconfiguring per-
ceptions of African Americans. Ransom’s statement clearly suggests Our
Heroes of Destiny was made to help produce a genealogy of race strong
enough to shape perceptions of the African American past, present, and
future. Less clear, however, is the advertisement’s implicit reliance on ideas
about reproduction and the insidious conceptual presence of racial purity.
The portrait photographs W. E. B. Du Bois commissioned for the Paris
Exposition of 1900, to which I now turn, also offer insights into how
ideas about reproduction and racial purity shaped images and perceptions
of African American women.
There are many aspects of the portrait photographs W. E. B. Du
Bois included in the American Negro exhibit at the 1900 exposition that
suggest they meant to inspire the ideas in the advertisement for C. M.
Battey’s photogravures. These portraits are intended to feature “excellent
examples of pure and dignified womanhood,” but the standard of purity
was more complicated for black women. They argue the women within
their frames are ladies, worthy of the honor bestowed upon white women
and therefore capable of reproducing a “pure” and “dignified” race. Ele-

gant, nuanced, and ladylike, the portraits of women Du Bois included in
the exhibition refute myths of the African American woman’s supposed
sexual availability and provide the visual component of the New Negro
Woman’s explicitly gendered identity. The clothing, lighting, looks, and
poses in these portrait photographs announce the African American
woman’s rightful place in femininity’s imaginary space. Dressed in Victo-
rian attire complete with chin-high collars, lace, and cameos, the expres-
sions on their faces are not exaggerated but serene and dignified. The
pearl grays, and soft, diaphanous whites of these black-and-white pho-
tographs underscore the argument that these women are ladies. Many of
the portraits veer toward profiles or silhouettes, the least confrontational
of poses, and subtly invite the viewer to see the dignified innocence of the
women’s acts of looking, reflecting, and thinking while also arguing
against denigrating physiognomic readings of the black face.
The portrait photographs of women Du Bois included in the Paris
Exposition were intended to announce and create the New Negro
Woman. A recognizable and discernible gender identity made this
announcement of newness possible. In American Anatomies, Wiegman
explains that for the African American slave, as well as those who might
be retroactively identified through that category, possessing a clearly dis-
cernible gender identity provided “possibilities of escaping the category of
the inhuman” (1995, 11). Not only do these photographs suggest that
placing oneself within the portrait’s frame of visibility often entailed
embodying a discernible gender identity, but they may implicitly
strengthen the punitive image repertoires and accompanying assumptions
against which they argue. Some might claim that instead of pointing out
how very little in American history gave black women the opportunity to
become ladies, these portraits sanction the assumption that the “Old”
Negro Woman was not worthy of respect.
In “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image
of the Black,” Henry Louis Gates expresses ambivalence about the New
Negro and the reconstruction of the African American’s image. For Gates,
the New Negro is a call for a repressive insistence upon success, an amne-
sia founded upon self-negation and blame. The trope of the New Negro,
according to Gates, suggests it was the burden of African Americans to
refute the names and images that were not of their own making. Reflect-
ing on Booker T. Washington’s anthology A New Negro for a New Century
(1900) and its rhetoric of uplift, Gates writes that the slavery of the not-
too-distant past “is buried beneath all of the faintly smiling bourgeois
138 KIMBERLY LAMM
countenances of the New Negroes awaiting only the new century to

escape the recollection of enslavement” (1988, 139). While Gates wants
to stress that the New Negro was only a slight and repressive step away
from the Old Negro, he is forced to acknowledge the astonishing pre-
ponderance of racial stereotypes in turn-of-the-century visual culture. “By
1900,” Gates writes, “it would have been possible for a middle-class white
American to see Sambo images from toaster and teapot covers on his
breakfast tables to advertisements in magazines, to popular postcards in
drugstores” (1988, 150). Therefore, Gates recognizes the necessity of the
New Negro: it was a trope and strategy of survival. But acknowledging
political and psychological necessities does not foreclose the possibility of
questioning their ultimate effectiveness. The visual art of Weems and
Simpson revisits the portrait photograph to reveal and contest the
assumptions informing its history. However, their work does far more
than expose complicities or faulty efforts. It acknowledges the necessity of
cultural recognition while reconfiguring its terms; it also points to the dif-
ficulty of excavating, reshaping, and reimagining the racist and sexist for-
mulations within cultural perceptions.
Weems’ and Simpson’s work achieves this balance by showing that
the past shapes the present through small, often overlooked details. Both
bodies of work show that details build and synthesize into automated per-
ceptions and composite images of the raced and gendered subject. More-
over, it is in the details where assumptions confront the materiality of
visual images and therefore are places where perceptions might be recon-
figured. Therefore, Weems and Simpson compose their images with a
careful, shrewd attention to detail. Weems works against the portrait’s
emphasis on singularity, its excision of context and history, and places
images within narratives that signify collectivity. Whereas Weems brings
more detail to portraiture, Simpson reduces portraits to their fundamen-
tal components. By deconstructing portrait images, Simpson shows how
the details of the genre contribute to arguments about the subject within
its frame. Simpson’s Details (1996, figure 5.11), re-presents a gallery of
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century portraits perhaps similar to
the one displayed in Paris under the auspices of Du Bois’ approving eye.
Instead of representing faces, Simpson isolates and focuses upon the
hands of the portrait subjects. In Details, we see the hands of African
Americans crossed, resting at their sides, placed on books, tables, and
musical instruments, holding a telephone and a child’s ball. These hands,
separated from images of bodies and faces, call attention to the composed
arrangements of the photographs. We associate hands with making and
140 KIMBERLY LAMM
constructing, and Details seems to stress African Americans’ acts of self-

making on the photographer’s stage.
This chapter’s brief foray into the African American visual culture of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is meant to place Weems’
and Simpson’s work within historical arguments about African Ameri-
cans’ cultural visibility and political agency. Indeed, this history empha-
sizes visual perception’s stubborn complicity with racist and sexist ideolo-
gies and therefore highlights the “inventiveness” necessary for
reconfiguring, rather than reactively reinforcing, images and perceptions.
My focus on the portrait stresses the importance of political, cultural, and
psychological visibility, as well as the difficulties and subtleties of possess-
ing visibility and recognizability on one’s own terms. Neither Weems nor
Simpson delve into realms beyond recognition, which is part of the rea-
son the portrait is one of their work’s subjects. Text and the multiple lev-
els of reading inspired by a visual framing of text are crucial to imagining
new portrayals of black women. Kellie Jones writes that “the act of lin-
guistic intercession is inclusive; it sets up a rereading that contains a trace
of the earlier history and a new reality” (2002, 91). Untangling word from
image and image from word, both Weems and Simpson unsettle the sym-
bolic orders of race and gender into visible relief, revealing its configura-
tion of reality as well as the ideological blind spots that marshal against
discovery, insight, and progress. To refute without repressing, to acknowl-
edge the presentness of the past, to see and write a space of the new and
less oppressive, to resist making women the emblem of racial oppression
or salvation are the challenges Weems and Simpson have set for them-
selves, as contemporary artists and black feminists.
6
The Coloniality of Embodiment
Coco Fusco’s Postcolonial Genealogies

and Semiotic Agonistics
Eduardo Mendieta
My name is Coco Fusco, and actually, I was born in the U.S.

and am genetically composed of Yoruba, Taino, Catalan,
Sephardic, and Neopolitan blood. In 1990, that makes me
Hispanic. If this were the ‘50s, I might be considered black.
—Fusco and Gómez-Peña, “Norte: Sur”
Well, I would say that my identity has always been a problem

for most people. They are constantly trying to change it.
When I was born, the nuns in the hospital thought they were
doing my parents a favor by classifying me as white. Then my
mother got deported just after I was born and took me to
Cuba with her, where everyone saw me as mulatica clarita.
—Fusco and Gómez-Peña, “Norte: Sur”
The work of Coco Fusco eerily epitomizes the situation of postethnic

racial subjects in a post–civil rights, post–cold war, and what Fusco her-
self has termed the “pan-American postnationalism” era (1995, 21–24).
Loathe as we may be to admit it, there are times when it becomes
inevitable to think of an artist’s works as being representative of a histor-
ical juncture. Coco Fusco’s oeuvre, which includes performances, writings,
criticism, reviews, photographs, videos, installations, journals, and letters,
has over the last two decades registered the shifts exacerbated and cat-
alyzed by the end of the cold war. Fusco’s work, however, cannot be sim-
ply consigned to the dramas and comedies of fin-de-siecle imperial Amer-
ica. Each historical moment contains within it the marks of earlier
141
142 EDUARDO MENDIETA
historical moments. Her work, therefore, cannot but also register the
imperial history of the United States of America. This is what makes her
work particularly significant and illustrative. If it is chronotopologically
indexicalized, marking the now and here of geopolitical time, it is also a
temporal map that guides us through the contradictions, forces, and
above all, dispositifs, on which the present imperial pax Americana is pred-
icated and that conditions the coming future. Coco Fusco, a racially
mixed postcolonial subject, is also a child of the sixties civil rights move-
ments of racialized subjects in the United States. She is doubly racialized
and doubly ethnicized. On the island, she is a mulata, descendent of
slaves who bought their freedom. On the mainland, she is a Cuban
Latina, who is visually racially mixed. There, she is marked by the privi-
lege of dollars and an American passport. Here, she is a Latina/Hispanic,
Cuban American citizen. As the child of Cuban immigrants, she has
matured on the troubled waters between the mainland and the island. In
the case of Coco Fusco, a quasiexilic experience gave rise to an outlook
that positions itself beyond both the nostalgia of the return to a mythic
homeland, and the untroubled acceptance of any identity whatsoever. For
this reason, she is also postsocialist and post–Latin American, if by the
former we mean the way in which Cuba stood for the promise of a social-
ism with a Latin American face, and by the latter, we understand the way
in which Latin America was invented in the nineteenth century to invid-
iously juxtapose Anglo-Saxon crass materialism against communitarian,
humanistic Latinity. Her work is blunt, lucid, sobering, albeit infused by
a profound sense of humanity and care, but without being moralistic,
nostalgic, or derogating.
By now it should be evident that Coco Fusco’s work invites many
lines of analysis. Since it is so layered, and so deliberatively self-conscious,
it begs a prismatic hermeneutics, which would use each register to analyze
not just the conditions of artistic production in a post–cold war and
postethnic situation but also the very meaning and possible valances of
race and gender and the reinscription of the exotic, forbidden, and limi-
nal. In this chapter I will focus on only two aspects of Coco Fusco’s work,
advancing two theses, which are closely connected if not mutually impli-
cating: (1) her work offers elements of a postcolonial genealogy, thereby
giving her audiences a new set of connections and relationships; (2) she
instigates what I would like to call a “semiotic agonistics,” thereby chal-
lenging and contesting both specific meanings (such as what it means to
be “American,” as mentioned earlier) and how those meanings are pro-
duced (such as the ways in which identity is determined according to
The Coloniality of Embodiment 143
birthplace or ethnic kinship as defined in relation to the ethnic majority,

as in the case of the nuns where Fusco was born). In Fusco’s work we are
able to discern a critical, creative, and confrontational type of work that
enacts new forms of agency by reinscribing social space through bold
interventions in the racial imaginary of Euro-Atlantic society. The first
thesis, then, argues that in Coco Fusco’s performances we are able to dis-
cern the artistic-conceptual elaboration of what I would like to call a
“postcolonial genealogy.” Genealogies scan and map three elements of the
matrix of agency: discourses, truths, and institutions. A postcolonial
genealogy is a type of analysis that focuses on the dispositifs that subject
and subjectivize, that subalternize by othering while also auguring the
very conditions of the contestation of that subjectivization and subject-
ing. My claim is that Fusco’s work has doggedly focused on the institu-
tional spaces, their respective discourses, and the truths that they pro-
duced and peddled, and that in tandem have produced postcolonial
agents. The postcolonial, it will become clear, registers the triple “post” of
postsocialist, post–Latin American, and postpax Americana, in the geopo-
litical historical calendar. In Fusco’s performances we encounter unmask-
ing, reinscription, and interpellation of the institutional spaces (for exam-
ple, the museum, or the mall), the discourses (for example, art criticism,
or humanitarian-moralizing feminism that knows best what “dark”
women need), and the truths (of art, sex/gender, race) that betray our
place on the pyramid of imperial/colonial power.
The second thesis has to do with the irreverent, insurgent, genera-
tive, and contestational character of her work. If the colonial condition has
to do with the asymmetry of a master gaze that refuses and disallows the
subaltern to look back, Coco Fusco’s work is about destabilizing that asym-
metry by daring to look back, to gaze back, to answer back, insolently, elo-
quently, assuredly, without shame or vacillation. This act of looking back
is enacted through semiotic agonistics. By “semiotic” I make reference to
how Fusco’s work is about destabilizing the signified and the signifier, by
appropriating the former while ridiculing and parodying the latter. By
“agonistic,” I make reference to how Fusco’s work is an avowed interven-
tion into the public sphere. In fact, it is more than that; it is a struggle for
the public sphere that begins with the creation of alternative public spheres
(see Fusco 2000, 1–20). Semiotics, or the semiological, makes reference to
a dynamic process of signifying, rendering legible and discernable mean-
ings within worlds, that uses images, words, and gestures synergistically
synthesizing the semantic, the syntactic, and the pragmatic aspects of signs
(on this use of “semiotics,” see Hodge and Kress 1988). The semiotics I
have in mind here is that of Charles S. Peirce rather than that of Fernand
Saussure. Whereas Peirce’s semiotics focuses on the primacy and synthesiz-
ing role of the triadic relation of sign (thirdness always presupposes first-
ness and secondness, and for this reason he called his semiotics “pragmati-
cism”), Saussure’s focuses primarily on the syntactical and semantic
relations among signs. With Peirce’s semiotics we are closer to the realiza-
tion that when we say semiotics we mean worlds of meaning—or the mean-
ings/significations that disclose worlds as worlds, as contexts of significance
(for a discussion of Peirce’s semiotics see Apel 1995).
Signs are, however, speech acts, or “communicative acts,” which are
above all possible because of the public spaces in which they are enacted
and performed. Semiotics and agonistics are two sides of the same public
event. In Fusco’s work, semiotic agonistics is both insurgent and creative;
it is against and for. The “post” in the postcolonial denounces as much as
it announces. It signals a temporal juncture: what comes is prefigured as
the obsolete is rendered past.
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
Whether its goal has been to escape the strictures of the art
market, to break with the tradition of contemplating objects,
to explore extreme behavior, or to draw the aesthetic experi-
ence back into the sphere of communal ritual, performance
art is almost invariably centered on the artist’s body.
—Fusco, The Bodies That Were
Not Ours and Other Writings
There is an almost oxymoronic aspect to a text that seeks to discuss prop-

erly, and with hermeneutical capaciousness, a body of work whose heart
and gravitational center is the performance of body and the body in per-
formance. Unlike commenting on a text, by way of another text, where
the phenomenology of communication remains on the same plane,
approaching Fusco’s work by way of a written text betrays and elides the
phenomenological aperture, what Martin Heidegger called “prima
philosophia,” namely, phenomenological disclosedness, of her perfor-
mances. Worlds are disclosed, or rather worlds are worlded, that is to say,
worlds are not found in the sense of encountering something preexisting,
but rather they are produced and created by meanings, language games,
traditions, and semiologies (ways of representing the world). Worlds are
worlded, more specifically, by way of weaving a somatic semiology, that
is, the body as a sign and the signs that transmit and transit culture as
bodies. Worlded worlds create the historical and material stages in which
and through which social agents can, and sometimes must, assume cer-
tain places, locus, of action or agonistics. Thus, beware of this text. It is a
twice-, perhaps thrice-, removed approximation. I have read most of
Fusco’s writings, descriptions of performances, and her web page, and I
have seen pictures of her performances. But I have not heard her voice,
nor have I seen her in performance. Yet I have been mesmerized by her
writing, her clarity, and her “passionate irreverence” (Fusco 1995,
25–26). Neither corpus delicti, nor guilty by association, but I have been
to several of Guillermo Gómez-Peñas’ performances and readings in San
Francisco, which is how I discovered Coco Fusco. Again, the point is not
that I know, and experienced the work of, someone who knows and
worked with Coco Fusco. The point is that this is a text that is just a text
about texts, when the point is to have been phenomenologically chal-
lenged and deranged by her performances. Indeed, a text about a text,
read quietly and privately, neutralizes the effect of Fusco’s performances,
which are meant to uproot us from our quotidian ways.
As always, we must abjure mere hermeneutical humility, if I ain’t got
it right, it ain’t because of Coco Fusco or her work but because of me and
my own fetishism of the written word. The preceding was an antecoda.
The other antecoda is that I am neither an art critic nor an artist. I
approach her work not as someone who wants to assess her work as a con-
tribution to the art world nor how it stands as an artistic event as seen by
another artist. Her work challenges me as a philosophical event, as an event
that merits geopolitical philosophical mediation. Like the artist, the
philosopher is a creature of her time, her geopolitical tick-tack, here and
now, on the world-historical map-clock, which is Adrienne Rich’s chrono-
tope, that is, a place on the map is a time in history.
The following is a truth, which is not a non sequitur—the very
philosopher who claimed that phenomenological truth is pure disclosed-
ness, the kind of event that is both historical and existential, could not rec-
ognize how his own proclivities were historically and existentially condi-
tioned. And today, most continue to indulge him in this act of
self-delusion. This philosopher was Martin Heidegger. In one of his most
memorable and influential pieces of reflection, “The Origin of the Work of
Art,” from the mid-1930s, Heidegger described a painting by Van Gogh,
which he thought represented worn out peasant shoes. Heidegger’s discus-
sion of Van Gogh’s painting is strategically placed in a subsection of the
essay entitled “thing and work.” The aim of Heidegger’s phenomenological
analysis is to demonstrate how the shoes, as things represented, already

evoke an entire world. A thing is by virtue of the world in which it exists,
and it exists by virtue of how it is disclosed through and for humans. Still,
the shoes are worn, torn, almost already useless as shoes, but in their desti-
tute status as no longer shoes, or no longer useful as shoes, these very shoes
point to the soil, the earth, the sun, the sky, the rain, the weather—a world
that is beyond human subjectivity, a world that is the stage of human sub-
jectivity. The shoes are witness and testimony. They attest to, and give evi-
dence of, something that supersedes human willfulness, deliberateness,
instrumental rationality, in a word, das Ge-stell, en-framement, the positing
of something as something, though not as the truth of being, but as the
concealment of such being due precisely to Dasein’s own form of dis-
closedness. The work of art is fundamentally a disclosing that discloses the
concealing of human disclosedness. As a work of art reveals, it renders us
forlorn and dejected, for we have been found out in our acts of untruth, or
more precisely, inauthenticity.
It is all so wonderful. In this beautiful essay from 1935, less than a
year away from his administrative debacle, less than a decade following
the momentous Being and Time of 1927, Heidegger approaches a truth
that he could never fully grasp: a work of art worlds because it is, in the
first place, already an act of worlding (welten). For him the work of art is
about the event of disclosure of being, not about the disclosure of social
relations. But already in 1935, Heidegger should have known better. This
is the year of the great Nuremberg rallies of the National Socialist Party,
so diabolically engineered and staged by Albert Speer, filmed by Lenny
Reifenstahl’s In the Triumph of the Will, and masterfully exploited and
peddled by the minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. In 1935, Hei-
degger should have known that the object of the work of art had been
dematerialized by mass production and mass consumption. Heidegger
should have realized, like Walter Benjamin did, that art could also be
turned into a tool of political aesthetics at the service of political fetishiza-
tion and idolatry. After Auschwitz, the Gulags, Hiroshima, and the many,
many pictures of white cops fire hosing and letting loose their dogs on
African Americans, art can no longer be naively about “the thing.” The
cubists, impressionists, pointillists, and futurists of the early part of the
twentieth century had already begun to dismantle the alleged objectivity
of the thing. Representational art was at an end. Its heyday may have been
during the height of Cartesianism: when a subject stood in opposition to
an object, but this heyday is surely a mythology, as the institution of art
and what it produces does not always run parallel to the meanderings of
philosophy. If we follow Hegel, philosophy conceptualizes what was first

being disclosed in the aesthetic realm. Thus, Cartesianism may be said to
register the already dawning crisis of the opposition between an autarkic-
epistemological subject and a preexisting, ontologically stable, object.
This is a truth, in the sense that truth is always phenomenological
disclosedness, beauty is no longer approachable by way of the object, or the
representation of things, or what Arthur Danto has called “representational
equivalences.” Beauty is no longer that for which art quests. The promesse
de bonheur, the utopian promise that motivates art, that calls art forth, is
no longer in the beauty that can be representationally mimicked. Beauty is
beyond the visible; beauty is no longer physical. Beauty has turned con-
ceptual. Beauty is insight qua sight that sees through the fetish, the mere
appearance, of the mass-produced object. And this is why Coco Fusco is
so interesting. She is an artist that performs beauty by arting (if we under-
stand art as worlding, or in other words, as a verb and not a noun) the
body. This performed body and body as performance is a way of repre-
senting that immediately mocks representation, for it is a way of approach-
ing the materiality of embodiment with the awareness that all representa-
tion is fetishistic. Which brings me to the penultimate antecoda.
Performance is about the ephemeral, the act as an event, chrono-
topologically indexed—here and now are indices of geopolitical time (see
Adrienne Rich reference above). If art must and can survive beyond the
demise of the object and its representation, if art is to mean anything
beyond the crisis of Cartesian subjectivity—read Cortes’s ego conquiro, as
Enrique Dussel has so eloquently argued—if art is to at all be truth as phe-
nomenological disclosedness, although now translated/betrayed beyond
Germano-, Greco-, Eurocentrism, then art has to turn us to the world that
worlds, the worlding of worlds—the way in which agents constitute life-
worlds and lifeworlds constitute subjects—in which objects are commodi-
ties raised to the -nth power. If art is to mean anything today, then it can
only be on the grounds of its turning into a major performance of an exor-
cism of the material world and commodified subjectivities. And this is
why, again, Coco Fusco is so fascinating to me, a pan-American postna-
tional agent, who, not unlike Heidegger, is trying to figure out what phi-
losophy and art can say to each other after the death of the Cartesian sub-
ject, and the failure to find the Newtonian object, in an age of growing
economic disparities and complacent bureaucratic multiculturalisms.
The final, truly, antecoda has to do with the title of this chapter.
What do I mean by “coloniality of embodiment”? The term coloniality was
coined as an adjective by Latin American social theorist Anibal Quijano,
who used it to describe relations between the former colonial powers and
recently decolonized societies (Quijano 2001, 117–31; see also Gorsfoguel
2003, 1–40). Relations between a metropolitan, colonial center and a
peripheral, recently decolonized outpost remain asymmetrical, unbal-
anced, and differentiated precisely because of the colonial past that deter-
mined their historical relationships. Quijano uses ‘coloniality’ to modify
and conjugate power. Power never exists pure and isolated. It only exists
historically and is institutionally inflected and transmitted. Just as eco-
nomic, political, and social relations remain clearly determined by the
colonial character of the former relations between the colonial center and
the subaltern periphery, Quijano suggests further, epistemological power
continues to be refracted by coloniality. In other words, forms of knowing,
cognizing, theorizing, and representing the world are rendered asymmetri-
cal by the coloniality of the power that authorizes, or deauthorizes, legiti-
mates, or delegitimates, certain epistemic frameworks and assertions.
Coco Fusco’s work exemplifies how embodiment is also determined
by the coloniality of power relations. The body does not exist as a prehis-
torical prius, a tabula rasa on which then society grafts or inscribes its par-
ticular grammar of vices and virtues, passions and disgusts, desires and
psychosis. Rather, the body is the detritus, the very specific product of
forms of embodiment. The coloniality of embodiment merely directs our
attention to the fact that since the sixteenth century, very specific regimes,
modalities, technologies of embodiment have been determined by colo-
niality. To the coloniality of power corresponds the coloniality of embod-
iment. To the flesh that is the trace of social desire corresponds the flesh
as the register of social control. The coloniality of embodiment is one way
in which we can understand how it is that social agents such as Coco
Fusco can be so differentially and inconsistently racialized as they trans-
gress and irrupt across a cartography written by slavery, Jim Crow, civil
rights, an unfinished cold war, and bureaucratic multiculturalism. These
inconsistent, risible, and thus also patently cruel and arbitrary logics of
racialization do not obey the rationality of a formal principle but rather
the fiat of power. But where there is power, there is also resistance.
THE HUMAN ZOO, OR THE

DIORAMAS OF IMPERIAL PAGEANTRY
The cage became a blank screen onto which audiences pro-

jected their fantasies of who and what we are. As we assumed
the stereotypical role of the domesticated savage, many audi-
ence members felt entitled to assume the role of the colonizer,

only to find themselves uncomfortable with the implications
of the game. Unpleasant but important associations have
emerged between the displays of old and the multicultural fes-
tivals and ethnographic dioramas of the present. The central
position of the white spectator, the objective of these events as
a confirmation of their position as global consumers of exotic
cultures, and the stress on authenticity as an aesthetic value, all
remain fundamental to the spectacle of Otherness many con-
tinue to enjoy.
—Fusco, English Is Broken Here
One of the most consistent themes in Coco Fusco’s performances is the

body in exhibition, or more precisely, the idea that for some embodi-
ment is intricately entwined with the very practice of being exhibited, of
being under the panoptic gaze of others, who cannot be looked at in
return. In a series of performances during the early 1990s, prompted by
the quincentenary of the so-called discovery of the New World, Coco
Fusco, in cooperation with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, looked straight at
the pornoscopic imagination of the colonial West. In Madrid, London,
New York, Sydney, and Buenos Aires, Fusco and Gómez-Peña were
exhibited in a cage as “Two Undiscovered Amerindians.” These two Indi-
ans hailed from the island of Guatinau, located somewhere in the Gulf
of Mexico, and which had been mysteriously overlooked and bypassed
by European colonialism. They lived in the cage and performed
pseudoauthentic acts, such as weaving voodoo dolls, grooming and pet-
ting each other, speaking in fictitious indigenous languages. They also
allowed themselves to be touched and fed by museum visitors. For an
additional fee museum and exhibition visitors could get a peek at an
“authentic Guatinaui male genitalia.” The central idea of this mocking
act was to enact a practice that had been so central to the very perfor-
mance of European and Western colonial power. The performance “Two
Undiscovered Amerindians” made reference to many of the traditional
practices of exhibiting peoples—pillaged, cannibalized, and carnival-
ized—from colonized lands. Fusco in fact gathered a catalog of these
exhibitions of what we can call “imperial pageantry,” which began in
1493, when Columbus brought back to Spain an Arawak and left him
on display at the Spanish court, continued through the early nineteenth
century, when “The Hottenton Venus” (Saartje Benjamin) was exhibited
throughout Europe because of her unique female anatomy (it is not to
be forgotten that after she died her genitals were dissected and put in a
jar for exhibition; her labia apparently were extremely unusual [Sharpley-
Whiting 1999, 16–31]), and concludes in 1992, when a “black woman
midget is exhibited at the Minnesota State Fair, billed as ‘Tiny Teesha,
the island Princess’” (Fusco 1995, 43).
The performance’s success, however, was measured by the diversity
of responses it evoked in the many viewers. These responses, however,
betrayed how the colonial subjectivity of colonial masters lives on in
post–cold war Western societies. One particular response is indicative. A
disturbed and offended visitor to the Washington, D.C., version of the
exhibition called the “Humane Society” to complain and denounce what
one must imagine was in this caller’s worldview an outrage. The caller was
told that “humans” were outside the jurisdiction of the Humane Society.
The irony, but also profound misrecognition revealed in this humanistic
gesture, is deeply telling of how humans in cages are not even human,
even as one may consider them worthy of some measure of humane
respect and even sympathy. Another very telling response was that articu-
lated by some sailors, who thought that the cage was a good idea because
the putatively undiscovered Amerindians might become frightened and
attack visitors. Others thought that because they were different they did
belong in cages. Others felt that they did not belong in cages because they
were not visibly deformed and thus were not freakish enough. Many also
complained to the museum administrators because they had been
deceived and misinformed—had they seen through the artifice and the-
atricality of it, just as they yearned that the true thing, the authentic
undiscovered savage, had been presented to them? This is the question.
Even if we were to encounter not yet discovered and colonialized peoples,
would we, could we, exhibit them as fascinating creatures in cages?
Indeed, what is the nature of the fascination in this act of pornoscopia? Is
it scientific curiosity, or is it a display of imperial power for the sake of the
pedagogy of the colonial subject, who is educated into the privileges of
such pornographic gaze?
During the mid 1990s, Coco Fusco collaborated with Nao Busta-
mente in developing the performance entitled Stuff (figure 6.2). As Fusco
put it, “Stuff is our look at the cultural myths that link Latina women and
food to the erotic in the Western popular imagination. We weave our way
through multilingual sex guides, fast-food menus, bawdy border humor,
and much more. In the course of the performance, we mingle with audi-
ence members, treating them to a meal, host of rituals and exotic legends,
and occasional rumba and at least one Spanish lesson as part of our satir-
ical look at the relations between North and South” (Fusco 2001, 111.) If
Stuff had been a written text, one could say that it was a palimpsest, a tex-
ture on which layers upon layers of text had been written, effaced, writ-
ten, to be effaced again. Stuff, however, was a performance, in which parts
of a script were added or withdrawn, in which dialogue may and must
have been improvised, and into which all kinds of participants were
drawn.
There are two particularly interesting sections of the performance
that I would like to highlight. One has to do with the consumption of the
exotic, the other with the cheap and duplicitous moralism of patriarchial
society. I turn to some lengthy though wonderful quotes. In scene 1,
Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamente sit at a table, writing postcards. Fusco
picks up one and reads it:
May 10th, Hamburg: Hello my sweet Suzy, I just can’t seem to get away
from sex! I’m staying in St. Paul, the bizarre sex district of this city. The
working girls here dress like aerobics instructors. I guess it’s more practical
than the usual puta-wear. Well, the locals and the tourists are eating it up.
They are really crazy about the Brazilian girls. Ooh la la, the brazilenias are
beautiful and I guess it’s cheaper for the men to have them here than to go
to Brazil. Dark-skinned women drive the Germans wild! Everywhere I go
there is a lingerie ad staring me in the face that features a gorgeous black
girl with huge breasts. I see the ad all over the place, but I can’t seem to
remember which company I’m supposed to buy from. The girl is oh oh so-
distracting. (Fusco 2001, 112–13)
Women, in particular women of color, are indeed stuff. They can be cir-
culated like commodities, displaced and relocated in accordance with the
imperatives of colonial desire. If it is cheaper and more advantageous to
have the exotic and hypersexualized Latinas brought over to Europe, then
a whole industry of sexual tourism that traffics in women develops. If the
market cannot come to Europe, then the customer will come to where the
exotic beauty may be found. The note here is on the commodification of
women by way of their exoticization. Yet another note is also marked
here, and that is the gratuitous and exorbitant exhibition of female and
colored bodies. Such surplus of visibility is not proportional to economic
profit; something else drives it. It is the libidinal economy that foments
and celebrates the consumption of the black and raced flesh that alone
explains the saturation of the visual field by the desired, although
depoliticized and neutralized, flesh of the black and subaltern women.
In another act of the performance, Coco Fusco, now assuming the
persona of Judy, who is wearing a “black mini dress and wild wig,”
addresses the audience in Spanish:
You can call me Judy. Depressed? Sure I get depressed. But it’s a job, honey.
What can I do? Nobody chooses to be born in a mess like this one. I try
not to think about things too much. When I feel down, I start thinking
about a new way to fix my hair. The Italians like wild hair, so I permed
mine to look more morena, what do you think? We have to eat, right?
My family? Oh, they’re used to it. When I bring a Gallego home, my fam-
ily doesn’t see him, they see a chicken, rice, beans and platanos—a full
fridge. When I tell the guys that I’m doing it to buy a pound of ground
beef, they feel better about giving me money, and they leave me more. I
don’t say I like to be in a nice room with air conditioning for a change. I
could sit in an office all day—I did that when I was working in a bank.
What did I get then? Oh darling absolutely nothing. (Fusco 2001, 120)
This is not Amsterdam or Madrid for that matter. It is Cuba. Judy is a
jinetera. Sexual tourism comes to the last cold war outpost by way of pax
Americana. Who are these sexual tourists: Italians, Germans, Gallegos
(Spaniards), and of course Americans, who come by way of Mexico. The
jinetera, however, tends to be a mulata, a mix between black and mestizo.
She is the exotic mix of Mediterranean and Caribbean genotypes: dark,
sultry, Afro, hazel eyes, and voracious sexual appetite. The mulata, how-
ever, has historically been related to the production of food. As the house
slave, she fed the master, who was invariably her illegitimate father. She
clothed, watched, and pampered the master’s children, who when old
enough would in turn assert their right of property by way of sexual ter-
rorism. The mulata is a quintessential figure of food, food producer and
provider, server, and preparer. Today, the mulata’s role is rewritten, in the
palimpsest of colonial racial embodiment, when as the sexual object of
choice of the tourist dollars, she becomes the main, and sometimes only,
breadwinner. In the Caribbean, the metonymic groin of the West, sugar,
coffee, and sex have coalesced in the body of the mulata, who today is a
jinetera.
In an essay written in 1996, entitled “Hustling for Dollars: Jineteras
in Cuba,” Fusco explores fully the historical vectors and contradictions
that converge in the phenomenon of the jinetera. On the one hand, there
is a whole history of the hypersexualization of the mulata that harkens
back to the slavery time in Cuban history. On the other hand, there is a
more recent history, such as the history of the revolutionary Puritanism
that sought to cathex the libidinal forces of the revolution into higher
production outputs. In a society where consumer goods were few
because they were indicative of bourgeois decadence, and because they
were also luxuries that were not available due to U.S. blockade, sex
became a cheap and often easy alternative source of pleasure. In Cuba,

however, sexual libertinage (a form of erotic resistance to the state, à la
hippie culture of the 1960s) due to a revolutionary history converges
tragically with the instigated sexual gluttony and affluence of societies
integrated into the circuits of a global economy that grants unimpeded
travel and access to almost any commodity. As Fusco put it: “What
Cuba’s current situation brings into relief is the connection between sex-
ual freedom and affluence. That a tropical socialist utopia that became
famous as a site of sexual liberation in the 1980s would be transformed
by necessity into a scenario ripe for its sexual exploitation in the 1990s is
just one of the more painful indicators of what it means for Cuba to be
reentering a global post-industrial economy” (2001, 114).
The jineteras have of course become major targets of government
control, surveillance, and abuse. They are celebrated by many as heroes,
reviled by others for their loose morals. The government, however, as
Fusco points out, is not particularly interested in the well-being of the
jineteras. They are a source of concern because they stand for a “black
market” that it cannot monitor, tax, and exploit. Fusco says that “who
profits is they key issue. What one’s position is on adult women’s resort-
ing to prostitution in Cuba hinges on the degree to which one can enter-
tain the idea that sex work, even for a woman in a poor third world
country, involves an exchange of benefits, and that it could be a viable
option by comparison to other choices available for survival” (2001,
147). This horizon of options—which, due to the racially differentiated
valances of bodies in Cuban society, per force must include sex work for
some—also becomes the region of a reassertion of white privilege and
psychotic purity. As the Cuban state seeks to control the work of jineteras
due to political-economic interests, society is invested in monitoring the
jineteras because they have become once again symbol of a threat to sex-
ual purity. Fusco writes: “The current obsession with controlling the
jineteras, I believe, is linked to deeply rooted cultural attitudes about sex
between black women and white men” (150). There is only one way in
which mulatas can be with white men, and that is at the scene of an
asymmetrical commercial exchange soiled by the blood of sexual terror
initiated with slavery. This scene and horizon of overdetermined options
is what we have here called “coloniality of embodiment,” by which I
mean that all forms, technologies, and what Foucault called “dispositifs”
of embodiment are indexed and suffused by the power traces of and
overdetermination by colonialism. It is not the same to be born white in
South Africa and white in Tennessee or Alabama or to be born Mulatto
in Cuba or Mulatto in Massachusetts. These differentials represent colo-

niality of embodiment.
In Fusco’s work we have one of the most lucid and deliberate med-
itations on and analysis of the way in which bodies, or rather and more
precisely, practices of embodiment are conditioned by the colonial histories
of the Americas. There are the histories of the sundering of will and inten-
tion from body and action that the reduction of the slave to property
entailed. There is also the chromatic indexing of slavery with blackness,
naturalized through legal institutions and practice that emphasize and
biologically trace matrilineal descent (see Martino 2002, esp. chapter 1).
The demotion of the black human to property also granted the
license to a boundless sexual violence, a sexual violence that moves simul-
taneously on two registers. On one side, there is the violence that can be
performed with utter impunity against the black flesh qua property. On
the other side, there is the violence that must be performed when blacks
have dared, or are suspected of having dared, to transgress the sacred
boundary that guards white privilege and sovereignty. Rape as the perfor-
mance of the putative right of the master is mirrored in the bloody ritual
of lynching black males for their alleged sexual transgressions (see Dray
2002; cf. Mendieta 2004 on the role of lynching as a racial violence to
force a reinscription of the plantation order). As Angela Davis put it,
“Lynching . . . complemented by the systematic rape of black women,
became an essential ingredient of a strategy of terror that guaranteed the
over-exploitation of black labor and, after the dismantling of gains made
during the reconstruction, the political domination of black people as a
whole” (Davis 1998a, 133; cf. Davis 2003). What Davis calls here “a strat-
egy of terror” we can call the “syntax of a racial imaginary,” the way in
which certain subjects are rendered omnipotent and supremely sovereign
and others wholly available, even dispensable. The syntax of racial imagi-
naries localizes some as subjects while rendering others mere inert mater-
ial to be acted upon. For this reason, to this syntax also belongs the way
in which blackness must be both utterly visible and completely absent.
This is what Fusco so adroitly captures in her performances that attend to
the body of the colonial subject that is both the scene of a crime and the
scene of the performance of a desire (see Fusco 2000, 2–3).
This imaginary that instigates certain passions and fears is pro-
foundly determined by the visual or rather by the dialectic of seeing and
being seen. As Homi Bhabha notes, “in order to conceive of the colonial
subject as the effect of power that is productive—disciplinary and ‘plea-
surable’—one has to see the surveillance of colonial power as functioning
in relation to the regime of scopic drive. That is, the drive represents the
pleasure of ‘seeing,’ which has the look as its object of desire, is related
both to the myth of origins, the primal scene, and to the problematic of
fetishism and locates the surveyed object within the ‘imaginary’ relation”
(Bhabha 1994, 76). Society is regimented by making each white subject
a peeping tom: they must want to look, and their look is lascivious. Their
look asserts a power to see without being seen. Meanwhile, the seen, who
is seen, who has to be seen, can only be seen, without looking back, with-
out being allowed to register the look as a look addressed to another sub-
ject. Black beauty saturates the streets of Amsterdam—the place of one of
Fusco’s performances—and the television screens of American mass cul-
ture, but only as the beauty of a scopic drive that fetishicizes. But as
Bhabha notes in the essay from which I just quoted, the scopic drive is
haunted and threatened by the returned look of the other. It is this look
of the other that challenges the asymmetry of the grammar of this racial
imaginary. Coco Fusco’s look is that look that dares to look back and
laugh, ridicule, and defetishicize that imagined and imputed identity.
Hortense J. Spillers’ words can be used here to give expression to the inno-
vative and radical character of Fusco’s work: “[T]he project of liberation
for African-Americans [postnational Pan-American postcolonial subjects
in Fusco’s grammar] has found urgency in two passionate motivations
that are twinned—1) to break apart, to rupture violently the laws of
American behavior that make such syntax possible [the syntax that
reduced humans to things]; 2) to introduce a new semantic field/fold
more appropriate to his/her historic movement” (Spillers 1987, 79).
In her performances Coco Fusco trades in identities, not in order
to claim that one is more authentic than the other but in order to desta-
bilize all imposed identities. She is also the sexual and racial other, exotic
and mesmerizing, who ridicules and contests the pornoscopic gaze of an
allegedly immutable subject. That she glides across the racial matrix of
the Americas through her work, makes her performances lessons in his-
torical imagination. Fusco’s work, however, does not stop with denunci-
ation. She also toils on the region of the novum. Her performances are
semiological agonistics that seek to introduce a new semantic field. Once
we understand the failed syntax of a racial order, a new semantic field
may be accessible. There was a time when bodies were not ours. To insist
on the post is necessary. Something must come after. Postnational, post-
Latin American, postcolonial, post-ethnic, postsocialism, post-pax
Americana: a window into what comes after these posts is opened in
Coco Fusco’s performances.
Part III
Changing the Subject
7
Pueblo Sculptor Roxanne Swentzell
Forming a Wise, Generous, and Beautiful “I Am”
Ruth Porritt
I think that women who have been hurt, or anybody who has
been hurt, tends to need to be reassured that things are OK,
like there’s a warmth around them. [. . .] And I think that
women and motherhood can give that kind of warmth. In the
traditional Pueblo thinking, the mother is a real central figure
for caring. I want to relay that kind of message so that people
who have been hurt can feel a sense that there’s a mother tak-
ing care of us. I think the Pueblo view of life can help the rest
of the world, but I don’t make my work just for Indian peo-
ple; I want to reach all kinds of people.
—Roxanne Swentzell in Abbott,
“Sculptor Roxanne Swentzell: Expressions in Clay”
People who nurture—mothers—tend to be much more hum-

ble, but in that humbleness there is a wisdom, a generosity,
and when not crushed, there is a beautiful I am, just plain and
simple.
—Swentzell, “Artist’s Statement”
As a contemporary Pueblo sculptor, Roxanne Swentzell is working within

the challenges of two different cultural ideas about women, portraying
both Pueblo women’s creative capacity and their unique gender position.
While choosing to maintain some values she has lived as a Native Ameri-
can, Roxanne makes sculptures for a global community she also recognizes
as her own. Her representations of Pueblo women’s embodied emotional
experiences leap the impasse of either/or—either gender essentialism or
161
162 RUTH PORRITT
social constructivism—in order to create new sites for women’s feelings,

thoughts, and actions. Ultimately Roxanne offers a revisionary approach to
our attempts to understand woman: she is not defining a category that
needs to be universally described, nor is she addressing a constituency that
needs to be politically organized, but rather she is representing individual
instances of embodied, expressive actions that deserve to be recognized for
their sustaining emotional power, a humble power that tends to work in
harmony with the generative resources of the natural world. Although this
respectful emotional power has been more frequently chosen by women
and so modeled by them, it is a power that men can also learn to chose and
model.
For Roxanne, careful attention to our emotional lives increases our
capacity for self-understanding even as it develops our ability to empath-
ically learn from others. “I am a sculptor of human emotions. I want to
show people a different part of themselves than they usually show. I
always hope the piece is strong enough to reach someone in their heart in
an emotional way that will make them feel like they had a spiritual expe-
rience of some sort. I keep believing that if I can keep reaching those
depths in myself, it’s going to help others reach that, too” (Pardue 1997,
2). “I think of [my sculptures] as emotional things and they all come to
me in a state of emotion. A lot of the time it will be right before I go to
sleep. I just feel them in my body. I know what I want to make” (Pardue
and Coe 1998, 43).
Roxanne’s creative making is distinguished by what I will call her
“standpoint emotional integrity,” a characteristic I identified after consid-
ering the writings of Kay Walkingstick, Oscar Howe, and Nancy Hart-
sock. Walkingstick’s standard of integrity applies to Roxanne: “My crite-
rion for all serious art is that it have the voice of integrity. . . . This art has
been developed by individuals educated in the traditions of twentieth-
century modernism, but also in touch with their Indian heritage, their
cultural differences, and their spiritual concerns. . . . They do not share
an aesthetic sensibility, but rather a strong self-identity as Indian people
and as artists” (1992, 16). Although artists with integrity do not ascribe
to any one school of thought, their own integrated sense of self-identity
provides the impetus for their work. In a letter to one of his friends, the
Sioux painter Oscar Howe addresses this sense of self-identity to under-
score the emotional and intellectual quality of the artist’s work; for him
the most meaningful art manifests “individualism [emotional and intel-
lectual insight]” (Strickland and Archuleta 1993, 10). Howe’s concept of
‘individualism’ is not a narcissistic egoism, but rather the self-reflective
Pueblo Sculptor Roxanne Swentzell 163
development of a personal vision that integrates the emotional with the

intellectual. Such an individual stands ready to make a singular contribu-
tion—through insight—to others. Some Native American artists may
have an individuated perspective that is also illuminated, in part, by what
Nancy Hartsock calls “standpoint epistemology”: “‘standpoint epistemol-
ogy’ is an account of the world as seen from the margins, an account that
can expose the falseness of the view from the top and can transform the
margins as well as the center . . . an account of the world which treats our
perspectives not as subjected or disruptive knowledges, but as primary
and constitutive of a different world” (Hartsock 1990, 171).
A standpoint position assumes the individual’s awareness of at least
two comparative frames of reference. When I write of standpoint emo-
tional integrity, I am discussing a sensitive individual’s perceptive con-
sciousness of intercultural and intracultural differences, particularly as
discrepancies in values or beliefs are carried by emotional recognitions.
The person’s clarifying apprehension is not intentionally divisive, for the
individual is not motivated by aggression but by an aspiration to under-
stand more fully, an aspiration often inflected by a strong sense of won-
der and hope. Through her thoughtful reflections and creative making,
the individual manifests a talent for forming an undivided—if emotion-
ally complex—whole. By appreciating the process of increased emo-
tional/intellectual understanding, as challenging or painfully sad as that
process may be, the individual is enlivened by transforming insights that
can result in feelings of humble awe.
Not only is standpoint emotional integrity located on the margins of
mainstream culture, but also it is specifically embodied; the sensations that
signal our emotions arise out of our bodies as physical responses to our
experiences with other people and our environment. For Roxanne, our
fullest kinds of knowing are initiated by our honest emotional recognitions:
Right now I think a lot of people are realizing that we can’t keep going the
way we have been. There’s so much pain in this realization that it takes us
inside ourselves. Hopefully, the next phase is to go completely inside where
we can find ourselves again. That may be painful, but we have to go
through to the other side. It’s a process. You have to go through the steps
to the other side, to come out of the suffering of not being ourselves. I do
not mean yourself with an image attached to it such as Indian, white,
banker, artist, etc. I’m talking about yourself as an individual with the abil-
ity to be part of this whole universe as you without a title attached, with-
out a name or culture to hide behind. When you take all of these off, what
is left? That is who I want to reach. In that place there are a lot of feelings
164 RUTH PORRITT
that are not moving and so are not allowing us to grow. You have to under-
stand that things are dying, including yourself—perishing inside. And
that’s painful. You have to know by feeling and experiencing that, or else it
doesn’t change. When you understand why, then it changes. You’ve gone
through the door. I’ve thought a lot about all this because I’ve had to. I
have a strong need to know why things are the way they are. My parents
definitely encouraged me to think about why” (1997, 219). [. . .] As a con-
temporary artist I see my work as not just preserving my culture but con-
tinuing it. I draw on the tradition and then innovate and experiment. It’s
a living thing. (Pardue 1997, 2)
In 1962 Roxanne was born into a Tewa-speaking family famous for
its pottery. Her mother, Rina Naranjo Swentzell, gave Roxanne access to
the culture of the Santa Clara Pueblo. Her father, Ralph Swentzell, a Ger-
man-descent faculty member at St. John’s College, gave her access to an
academic world influenced by European American culture:
When I think of it, I can still hear Gregorian chants playing in my
memories, and see Rubens’ paintings and Michelangelo sculptures.
Then my mother, grandmother, cousins, uncles, aunts—Pueblo
dancers, drumbeats, Indian clowns, and feast days when we would run
through the crowds catching the things they would throw. Then sitting
on the ground watching the feet of the dancers, not realizing for a long
time that the sound of the drumbeats were from a drum and not from
their feet hitting the earth. These two worlds danced through my child-
hood. Maybe because I am from both worlds I can see what I see.
(Swentzell 1997, 219)
As a young child Roxanne accompanied her mother as she made her pots:
“My mom potted so the clay was right there where I saw it all the time. I
had a speech impediment so I had to communicate in other ways, and I
started making figures that would depict what I meant. I hated going to
school so I made a clay figure of a little girl crying to explain how I felt.
I made hundreds of these figures” (Peterson 1997, 195). Roxanne had dis-
covered that she could make the clay express, in figurative form, what she
hoped to articulate. Her mother, Rina, was particularly aware of Rox-
anne’s artistic development. According to Rina,
[Roxanne] was born with an energy that assumed connection with the
earth. As a crawling baby, she wanted to be outdoors on the ground where
she could put dirt in her mouth and smear it all over herself. Later, before
school age, she loved to work with me in the pottery shop. Even then, she
made clay figures of people and animals in her world. These figures were
what she saw and felt around her. There was her dog, Flower, in a posture
that was not to be confused with any other dog. There was her dejected self
sitting at a desk in school with the feeling that no one was ever more
unhappy. (Fauntleroy 2002, 11)
In addition to working alongside her mother, Roxanne also visited her

uncle, Michael Naranjo, and stayed with him while he made clay sculp-
ture. Michael was blinded in Vietnam. Although he gave Roxanne her
own clay to shape, he was unaware of when it became too dark for Rox-
anne to see what she was doing. She continued to follow his lead, sculpt-
ing “by feel” in the darkness. “He didn’t have light bulbs in his studio
because he didn’t need them, so I would sit there in the dark. I was always
impressed by his being able to sculpt that way,” says Roxanne (Abbott
1997, 23). Her ability to express herself directly through her hands’ touch
upon the clay, the sense of the clay as felt form and not just a visual form,
is a distinctive trait she credits to her experiences with her Uncle Mike.
By the time Roxanne was in junior high school, she began con-
structing her clay figures as if they were pots, preferring the ancient coil-
and-scrape technique used by the Pueblo. Although she had been making
pots for her own functional use, as her interest in sculpting continued to
develop, she adapted her clay techniques to her figures. “I make [my
sculptures] in a traditional manner, meaning that they’re coiled like pots.
I sometimes call them fancy pots because I coil them up just like a pot
and form them as I go along” (Abbott 1997, 24). Her parents recognized
Roxanne’s aptitude for sculpting, so she was sent to the Institute of Amer-
ican Indian Art in Santa Fe for high school. Roxanne entered that educa-
tional experience not only with her sculpting talent, but also with skills
for thinking about why she was doing her work. “Both my parents were
very encouraging when they saw that I had a talent for working with clay.
They were people who wanted me to think about what I did, to have a
reason for why I did what I did, and not just do things haphazardly. My
mother was known for her Pueblo philosophy and she writes quite a bit.
They encouraged me to have a whole philosophy” (Abbott 1997, 23).
Roxanne’s tendency to reflect upon her own work gave her an indepen-
dent perspective that helped her critically engage her educational experi-
ences. She decided for herself how she would approach her own work.
Many of the teachers at the Institute of American Indian Arts were white
people who were trying to get Indian artists to make what the white peo-
ple thought was Indian art. This caused a lot of conflict for me. I thought
If I am an Indian then I’ll automatically be making Indian art because that’s
what I am. If we see through our eyes then whatever we are will come out.
166 RUTH PORRITT
And that means whether I am an Indian or not. It doesn’t really matter.

What matters is that whatever appears from within us is true. I learned to
listen to myself and not be so influenced by what other people wanted me
to make. I am going to represent the world through my eyes—and not as
somebody told me I was suppose to. (Roxanne Swentzell 1997, 216)
Her clarity about her own values enhanced her ability to make work that
was esteemed by her instructors. The school gave Roxanne her first show
in their museum. The following year she moved to Portland, Oregon, to
attend the Portland Museum Art School.
People in art school looked at art very differently than I did. I got really
depressed when I was in Portland because I felt that the people there had
separated art from their lives and from everything around them. It
became a dead world to me. I couldn’t understand why people would do
art just for art’s sake. To me, art always had to come from a life experi-
ence—or what was happening around me. It seemed so strange to be
walking a city street or through a parking lot and see the homeless on the
side of the road, or see people crying. The focus of the art school seemed
to be disconnected from these realities. I could not pretend I never saw
that, then try to make this piece of artwork that had nothing to do with
what I had just witnessed. Making a piece of art, to me, had to be as full
an experience of myself as I could possibly relay. If I was going through
a lot of pain in my life, I couldn’t possibly make a sculpture of a jolly guy,
because my tears would ruin his smile. I’ve tried to say something I really
didn’t feel in my art, but it just looks and feels like a lie to me. (Roxanne
Swentzel 1997, 216)
Roxanne’s response to her art school experience indicates a radical
difference between the Tewa approach to art and modernist European
American conceptions of art. Modernist conceptions of art as creative
making often assume distinctions among art, craft, and daily tasks. The
Tewa approach to art as creative making does not hold these distinctions,
but rather overcomes them through a broader recognition of the value of
all constructive human agency working in cooperation with the environ-
ment. According to Roxanne’s aunt, Nora Naranjo-Morse, “In the Tewa
language, there is no word for art. There is, however, the concept for an
artful life, filled with inspiration and fueled by labor and thoughtful
approach” (1992, 15). For the Tewa, the artful life encompasses both the
individual and cultural processes of rejuvenation or revitalization, span-
ning all actions that seek, find, regain and renew life (Sweet 1985, 12).
Rina affirms the connection between people’s artful life and their rela-
tionship with the environment:
Much has been written about native language not including art as a word
because the individual creative act in the traditional [Tewa] world was
about doing things in a way to feel oneness with other humans as well as
with the earth, clouds and wind. Achieving an understanding of the flow
of life within which one participated was the goal [. . . S]ensitivity was
expected not only of special people, or people called artists. Every person
was expected to be sensitive to his or her physical, emotional and spiritual
context. Therefore, every person was a creator, a reshaper, who had the
capability to bring unassociated elements into some definable whole or
form. (Rina Swentzell 1998, 14, 9–10)
Creative making is an alert practice where ethics and aesthetics become

interanimating, a practice that includes an attentive, respectful love for
others as well as for oneself. “With my sculptures I try to reach people’s
emotions so they can remember themselves. . . . Using gestures and
expressions, I try to bring these little people to life—to communicate in
a way other than with words. It’s good practice to use the other senses
besides just the mouth. I’m trying to do that with everything I do. Every-
thing we do has to be sacred. It doesn’t matter if you’re baking bread or
making a sculpture—or walking, it’s got to be done in the same manner.
It’s got to be done with love for yourself ” (Roxanne Swentzell 1997, 221).
This kind of self-respect is not self-centered but rather motivates each per-
son’s respectful awareness of the entire surrounding environment and the
balance between males and females.
What I try to get across to people is a way of seeing the world. That is the
Pueblo philosophy I was taught—the way of seeing the connectedness we
have with everything around us and being in touch with ourselves on both
the spiritual level and in the physical sense. More and more, I see people
out of touch with the physical environment around them. I think that’s a
key thing to what I try to express. A lot of my stuff, too, has to do with the
female. The female and male in Pueblo societies were much more balanced
that in the Western view. Because the Western view is so male-oriented, I
tend to push a lot of the female aspects to try to balance that out. The
female has many strengths that are ignored in Western society but which
are recognized in the Pueblo world. (Abbott 1997, 23–24)
Karen Kilcup agrees with Roxanne’s assessment that, on the whole,
women were more respected in Native American cultures than in Euro-
pean-influenced cultures. Although there was a diversity among tribal
groups that makes generalization difficult, Kilcup concedes that “we can
say that Indian women were often more valued than their European
counterparts, perhaps because they lived within communal organizations
168 RUTH PORRITT
where every member of the group contributed to its well-being. . . . Many

Indian cultures affirmed women’s power” (2000, 2). Rayna Green
reminds us that Native American social forms that involve men and
women in complementary, mutual roles—roles wherein both genders
interact equally with natural resources—cannot be productively analyzed
in terms of many European American feminist theories of female oppres-
sion (1980, 264). If Native American women in the past experienced a
balance of power as liberating, then they will tend to seek that balance
rather than fight for a perceived freedom from constraint. For Roxanne,
part of reestablishing that balance of power is making visible women’s
experiences. “Women’s lives are incredible but have been largely unseen,
and because of this I do a lot of women’s issues. I mean my heart goes out
to women so much. It seems like the older I get the more this topic inter-
ests me. If I do ten pieces, nine of them are women and one is a man. And
without consciously thinking that way. It just comes out that way because
that’s what ends up coming through me” (Roxanne Swentzell 1999, 16).
After living for a year in Portland, Roxanne returned home to
marry, work in clay, and raise two children, her son, Porter, and her
daughter, Rose. She exhibited and sold her work, winning a total of eight
awards at the annual Santa Fe Indian Market in 1986. After taking a five-
year break from Indian Market, she returned in 1994, to win the Wheel-
wright Museum and Joseph Block Sculpture Award. When her sculptures
were included in the 1994–95 “Sisters of the Earth” traveling exhibition,
Roxanne wrote a statement for the accompanying catalog that described
how her focus on the human figure is her personal way of posing several
related questions: “How do we, as human beings, fit into the world
around us? Why have we made ourselves so separate from nature? Could
this be the reason we feel so lost and empty and alone at times? Could our
remembering where we come from and how we are connected to all the
earth’s species bring us back home? Could finding our true selves bring us
closer to all other beings? And, could this be the thing we are most afraid
of, or could this be the very thing we all yearn for so deeply in our hearts?”
(Roxanne Swentzell 1994a). During her second marriage Roxanne and
her partner founded a nonprofit organization, Flowering Tree Permacul-
ture Institute, to study environmental living. After a 1995 visit to Rox-
anne’s home on the reservation of Santa Clara Pueblo to meet with the
young Rose, Bruce Hucko describes his impressions: “Rose leads an inde-
pendent life. She and her older brother are home-taught and live in an
adobe building designed and constructed by their mother and friends
without a blueprint. Organic, self-sustaining farming is practiced outside
the house. Inside, hand-made tools and furniture accentuate the simple,
spacious living space. Anywhere else the Swentzell’s style of living would
be considered alternative, but here, on a sunny June day, it just seems to
make common sense” (Hucko 1996, 64). Rose offers her own observa-
tions: “I think my life is a lot different than a lot of other kids’ lives. My
cousin Devonna has computer games and all kinds of things like that. I
don’t. We don’t even have electricity! Most kids have the TV constantly
playing. They don’t ever get to take care of plants and chickens, turkeys
and sheep. . . . I learn by watching Mama, just watching. I like forming
things with my fingers. It’s easier to get three dimensions in clay than with
drawing. And it tastes good!” (Hucko 1996, 64).
The Pueblo people’s relationship with clay provides a direct link
between themselves and their environment. Clay is considered “a gift from
Mother Earth, and like all of her gifts, it is sacred” (Timble 1987, 10). The
landscape of the Southwest is an expanse of desert, mesa, and mountain,
which is so formidable and austere that it resists being mastered. The land,
Mother Earth, cannot be easily exploited. There is nothing diminutive or
feminine about this landscape, given the European American understand-
ing of those terms; yet the land is the basis for Pueblo life. For the Pueblo
people who live, understandably, in reverence for this landscape, there is
no disdain for Mother Earth, for mud and clay, for women or for vessels—
or the relationships between them. Roxanne explains the Pueblo
beliefs:“We’re from this earth, we are creatures of this earth, she is our
mother. Remember where you come from. She is the one who gives you
life, and if you destroy her, you destroy yourself. When you work clay, you
understand your interdependence, your connections . . . I am a mud per-
son” (Rosenberg 1995, 82–83). The dynamic correlation between clay and
the human body is also lived by Nora Naranjo Morse: “For hundreds of
years Pueblo people have treasured their powerful relationship with clay.
Veins of colored earth run along the hillsides of New Mexico, covering
remote trails with golden flecks of mica. Channels of brown and scarlet
mud wash across the valleys, dipping and climbing the sprawling land-
scape. Intricately woven patterns of clay fan out under the topsoil, carry-
ing the life of pottery to the Pueblo people” (Naranjo-Morse 1992, 9). “I
am an open vessel. I never know what life’s experiences will give me, what
opportunity will inspire my creativity” (Peterson 1994, 184).
Like Nora, Roxanne retains confidence in her culture’s own way of
informing the metaphors of woman-as-earth and woman-as-vessel,
despite the disfavor these metaphors may now have in European Ameri-
can feminist circles. Assuming the European American male construction
170 RUTH PORRITT
of feminine earth and vessels as passive and submissive, some mainstream

feminists have critiqued these metaphors as exploitative of women in their
own culture. Surely we should dispense with the concept of the land as
virgin and subject to man’s power to rule, tame, and reform her. Surely we
should dispense with the concept of the woman as a passive vessel await-
ing man’s seed or goal or purpose, an idea as old as Aristotle. These
metaphors reinforce the devaluation of women and their subordination.
However, the Pueblo people’s experience of the southwestern landscape
and their deep appreciation for clay vessels endows their own metaphors
of woman-as-earth and woman-as-vessel with completely different values
that affirm women.
Roxanne’s 1998 clay sculpture Mixing Clay makes the equation
between the woman’s body and clay explicit, for with her feet the stand-
ing Pueblo woman, nude, is mixing the “clay,” which both composes the
figure and is its subject. The clay woman tests the clay in her fingers to
feel if it has the correct level of bond. In Making Herself, 2000 (figure 7.1)
Roxanne shows a nearly complete figure who uses a continuous clay coil
originating from her pelvis to form her one remaining leg: “She’s concen-
trating hard because she doesn’t want to mess up,” says Roxanne
(Fauntleroy 2002, 62), noting that she considers this piece a self-portrait.
Pueblo women are affirmed by their relationship with the materials of the
earth and their association with the power of Mother Earth. For Pueblo
people, creativity with clay is a female prerogative.
Made in Her Own Image, 1999, represents a delighted clay woman
who has formed a clay man by holding herself as the standard, a humor-
ous reversal of the male-centered Judeo-Christian creation myth. Speaking
of any woman’s assured ability to produce through clay, Ernest Tapia of
Santa Clara says, “A woman can make anything, any kind of shape with
her own hands” (Timble, 1987, 13). The ability to shape and reshape is
not a form of creativity particular to a male godhead. Women’s creative and
procreative power is highly regarded in Pueblo culture, and women do
establish an esteemed standard. Pueblo men are complemented by other
people’s recognition of what some European Americans would consider an
essentially female characteristic. “If you are a man and you are called Gia—
a nurturer—then you are being told something very good about yourself,
for you have a way of being which is like a mother,” Roxanne says (Rosen-
berg 1995, 83). For the Tewa, the ability to nurture is valued by both
women and men; it is not considered an essential characteristic of females.
Women’s choices to express emotional warmth and tender concern are not
denigrated to a second-rate status, for women are valued in Pueblo culture.
172 RUTH PORRITT
The Tewa myth of origins provides some suggestions for how tradi-
tional Pueblo groups have valued women. Rather than offering a chroni-
cle of how a male god creates something out of nothing and then fashions
a male as the first human, the Pueblo myth begins with a populated
Mother Earth as a given. However, the Tewa people and animals were liv-
ing underground, beneath Sandy Place Lake, in a realm that was dark but
where there was no death; they resided there with the two supernaturals
who were the first mothers of all the Tewa, “Blue Corn Woman, near to
summer” and “White Corn Maiden, near to ice” (Ortiz 1969, 14). Even-
tually these two mothers initiate the extended process of investigation
that will lead to the migration of the Tewa to the world above them,
which until that time had been “unripe,” its clay surface too soft.
The Tewa myth of origin is remarkable for its heterogeneity, its
depiction of a persistently good-willed sense of trial and error, and the
cooperative efforts of all beings to assist with the migration to the earth’s
surface, resulting in their successful emergence. Although the entire myth
is too elaborate to recount here, one of its most unusual features is that
four times the migration effort is halted and the group returns to the
underground realm because the beings realize they “are not yet complete
and that something else was needed” (Ortiz 1969, 15). During the sec-
ond return, the sacred clowns, the Kossa, were created to entertain the
people when they would grow tired and unhappy. The clowns were
marked with alternating stripes of dark and light—much like rock
strata—to show that they embody alleged contrasts such as male/female,
summer/winter, night/day. To resolve conflict and reestablish harmony,
the clowns prompt an affectionate humor based on wisdom or well-inten-
tioned foible, not a derisive humor based on foolishness or mockery.
Upon the final return, the Women’s Society was formed. Now all beings
agree that everything is complete, and the migration prepares to proceed
once again. Throughout the Tewa myth of origin, women are portrayed
as generative yet humble, as taking initiative yet not regarding themselves
as superior to others, as attentively watching over the entire community,
and as providing necessary perspectives that are required to form a com-
pleteness that makes the whole. These same caring features of strength are
complimented in men when Tewa people call them “Gia.”
Women’s relationship with Mother Earth is restorative as well as
generative. When Roxanne portrays Pueblo women’s disappointment in
love, she often implies that the woman’s relationship with Mother Earth
will soothe the emotional pain. In pieces such as Broken Hearts, Broken
Bowls, Now What? 1996 Roxanne presents the woman’s loving body as a
potentially damaged vessel. The saddened figure sits holding two halves
of a fractured bowl in each of her hands. The same circular design
embracing both the rim of the broken bowl and the woman’s torso not
only indicates the correlation between the woman’s body and the vessel
but also recapitulates, from Pueblo tradition, “the continuous movement
which represents the connective breath of the universe” (Naranjo 1994,
47). Roxanne implies that the woman’s ability to work constructively with
a broken vessel will inform how she decides to work constructively with
her own broken heart. If you look closely at the Pueblo landscape, you
find that it is the resting place for thousands of ancient pottery shards,
which are valued as signs of previous human making. Pottery shards are
also ground to use as temper for new clay. In the end, nothing is truly lost
in the Pueblo cycle of clay. Likewise, sadness acknowledges the distressing
experience of loss or anticipated privation, a poignant sorrow, which
means that, ultimately, an honest emotional life has been retained. Rox-
anne speaks about the significance of sadness and how it helps us gain
insight into our human condition, ultimately contributing to peace:
I hope we can all realize that we are very sad, blind people right now and
that all of us are searching for what we long for—a place, a sense of impor-
tance, and love. And we deserve that something, no matter who we are. I
would like us to be able to communicate with each other in a way that we
never could before. It’s just like talking to you. You are searching for love
and I am searching for it, too. Because we are hearing with our hearts
instead of our preconceived notions, we have just filled ourselves up. I
think it will get so we can do that with anybody. We will be able to say
When I cry I know she will understand why I am crying. When I laugh I know
she will know that I am not laughing at her. She will know I am laughing
because I feel good. And I can scream because I am hurt and you know why.
Then when you cry in front of me I can say Go ahead, cry. At that time we
will have peace. (Roxanne Swentzell 1997, 222)
Peace requires people’s mutual ability to protect each other’s vulner-

ability in sadness: we should recognize the tender human aspirations for
a good life that are intrinsic to heart-felt loss. Sadness is not feared as
debilitating but respected as granting capacity, for in our loss we know
clearly what we valued, what we aspired to do or be. The seated figure of
A Moment in Time, 1998 closes her eyes and tips her head sideways as if
to yield to a resolute sadness. Although her inward focus is solemn, her
sense of resignation seems to strengthen her rather than weaken her. In
Oh, My, 2000, the woman clasps her strong hands to her stricken face,
suddenly aware of loss. The urgent sadness of loneliness is presented in
174 RUTH PORRITT
Someone to Talk To, 2001; the woman’s face shows that “in that state of
real self-reflection, we are utterly alone,” says Roxanne (2002, 56).
However, it is exactly through the sadness of self-reflection that we
can grow in self-awareness. Even the Despairing Clown, 1992, who is usu-
ally wise and humorous, peels off the Kossa-striped skin to look beneath
the veneer of his role and sadly wonder what he should do next. The dark
clay woman of Hidden Feelings, 1997 is removing a white porcelain mask
with its fixed smile of pleasant cheer. Her own face manifests her fright-
ened sadness, for she recognizes that, try as she might, she cannot adopt
the dominant culture’s disapproving attitude toward sadness. If she feels a
foreboding sadness, then that is what she should express to others.
Although sadness is frequently classified by psychologists as one of the
basic emotions expressed beginning with infancy, it is remarkable that as
of 2000 no major synthetic work on sadness had been written in the Eng-
lish language (Barr-Zisowitz 2000, 607). This may reflect a censorious or
repressive attitude toward sadness within the European American culture.
Since sadness is a signal that we have emotionally recognized a distressing
problem, often a problem that has been ignored by other people, sadness
has a potentially subversive quality. Sadness precedes the plaintive request
for change and can be apprehended as a humble form of honest emo-
tional power that deserves respect. Lacking a culturally developed aware-
ness of sadness, European Americans may not be as able to move into
forms of constructive change that are initiated by states of sadness and
grief. To affirm the value of sadness and grief for Native Americans, Renya
Ramirez observes how emotional vitality and genuine insight for con-
structive reform require that we express real loss rather than pretend that
it has not happened (Ramirez 1998, 323).
Several of Roxanne’s sculptures include sadness as an aid for reclaim-
ing the self from destructive social conventions. The dejected woman in
Pinup, 2000 (figure 7.2) holds a poster of a curvaceous female torso over
her body. Her brown clay face has been covered with white foundation, her
artificially pale skin is highlighted with pink blush on her cheeks, and she
sports red lipstick to match the red fingernails in the poster. She has lost
her individuality in order to attain the “perfect” body, face, and skin dic-
tated by European American culture’s social standards for females. Her
pensive and apprehensive expression shows that she has begun to recognize
the dismal outcome of her loss of self. “There seems to be the need to tell
this story—about images versus reality—over and over in my work,” Rox-
anne comments (Fauntleroy 2002, 30). In Framed, 2001 the rueful
woman holds a gilded frame in front of her face, showing how separating
176 RUTH PORRITT
out any one part of a person for scrutiny is dehumanizing. The mortified
woman of In Crisis, 1999 is stunned by how clawlike and threatening her
long, red-painted fingernails seem to her. “She recognizes that these images
of what she’s supposed to be, especially from television, are an attack on
her,” Roxanne explains (Fauntleroy 2002, 32). The alternative image of the
self-defined woman who overcomes damaging social dictates about her
body-self appears in Kneeling, 2003. Her serene face and closed eyes indi-
cate her peaceful withdrawal from external influences. She lovingly
embraces herself with her crossed arms. In her artist’s statement for this fig-
ure, Roxanne says, “She gently holds herself, unaware of anything but the
feel of her own body. In a way she is kneeling to herself.” The same appre-
ciation for embodiment is recorded joyfully in Soaking in the Sun, 1990
(figure 7.3). As the woman feels the warmth caress her, she clasps her
hands with gratitude and pleasure. “Our simple desires, like sitting in the
warm sun, are sometimes our deepest reminders that we are truly fruit of
this planet,” says Roxanne (Fauntleroy 2002, 74).
Experiencing our embodied consciousness in sympathetic relation-
ship with the natural world gives us a sense of wondrous awe and humil-
ity. Although many of Roxanne’s sculptures address this theme, Window
to the Past, 2000 (figure 7.4) is based on Roxanne’s vivid memory of a par-
ticular childhood event. To respect Mother Earth, Roxanne’s mother
taught her not to dig into the earth to willfully find ancient shards or arti-
facts. If something came to the surface through a natural process, such as
the wash of rainwater, then she could accept it as a gift from the earth.
One day Roxanne studied an anthill and discovered a tiny stone bead
among the loosened grains of dirt. As she held the bead between her fin-
gers, Roxanne wondered who had made it, worn it, or given it to another.
She imagined the possible incidents involving the history of the piece of
stone as it left the earth for human community only to return to the earth
so that, eventually, an ant would bring it on another migration out of the
earth. “You’re tunneling through that little hole in the bead, getting a
peek into the past. You’re tunneling through time. Through the smallest
of things, you have a connection with the past,” says Roxanne (Fauntleroy
2002, 16). The clay woman holds the stone bead in her hand, knowing
that, in order to be made, it was once held in another person’s hand. Her
soft, transfixed gaze implies her thoughtful reflections on the implications
of her find. The seemingly fragile bead has endured. She feels humble awe
at how the bead and herself are both tiny yet significant parts of the gen-
erous systems of natural processes that will continue through time. Her
humility and the wisdom that results from her emotional insight prompts
her beautiful sense of “I am” just plain and simple—she has no need for
any role or social construction to give her a sense of identity.
Roxanne’s sculptures represent individual instances of embodied,
expressive actions that deserve to be recognized for their sustaining
emotional power, a power that tends to work in cooperation with the
generative resources of the natural world. Although this humble emo-
tional power has been more frequently chosen by women and so mod-
eled by them, it is a power that men can also learn to choose and
model, for it is a potential capacity within any human being. Some
men may have been acculturated to devalue or dismiss emotional
power because it seems humbling to them, reminding them of their
mortal bodies and how their competitive participation in realms of
social power can never prevent the final loss of their physical life. As
Susan Bordo has observed, both the modernist “view from nowhere”
and the postmodernist “dream of everywhere” share the same mis-
guided desire to escape from a material world where people are situ-
ated in physical bodies that produce knowledge (Bordo 1990, 145).
People influenced by modernism or postmodernism can consider
learning from the standpoint of Pueblo women and men who have
worked with clay and felt their bodies’ generative power as it joined
with the generative power of the earth: “Each person is capable of
thoughtful and creative action. . . . [T]o feel the creative power of the
universe and to express this power as a way of participating in it gives
[people] the feeling of being special and ordinary at once,” claims
Rina Swentzell (1997, 355). Personal significance need not be lost in
the confusion of dualities promoted by European American culture,
where the dichotomies of mind/body, male/female, white/Indian
establish divisions that prevent more comprehensive understandings
(Allen 1986, 134). When Roxanne was commissioned by the National
Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., to make a
sculpture that would encompass the hemisphere’s hundreds of indige-
nous cultures, she produced For Life in All Directions, 2004, a wall
installation of six people who dance together and reach out to include
other people. Visitors to the museum spontaneously smooth their
hands along the figures’ hands, as if accepting their implied invitation
to join them (Ault 2004, 50). Roxanne’s standpoint emotional
integrity has drawn upon her experiences of at least two different cul-
tures to make sculptures that expressively communicate to members of
the global community. She says, “I want to symbolize women, and my
culture, and humanity. I am trying to say things to the world, and the
180 RUTH PORRITT
response has been amazing! My pieces are crossing cultural and all
kinds of boundaries. People from all over the world see things in my
pieces. It has been very, very exciting to me, the ultimate communi-
cation” (Peterson 1997, 195).
I Sculpt
To reach out to you
Hoping to go past
the words and thoughts
that bind us
to a shallow world
Hoping
to catch a moment
of direct connection
between your soul
and mine
then for that second
we will remember
what is important
and in remembering
there is hope.
—Roxanne Swentzell
8
The Syncretism of Native American,
Latin American, and African American
Women’s Art
Visual Expressions of Feminism,

the Environment, Spirituality, and Identity
Phoebe Farris
INTRODUCTION
This chapter discusses aspects of traditional Native American

religion/spirituality and traditional African religion/spirituality that are
evident in the art of Latin American, African American, and Native
American women artists. Artists that fuse both African and Native Amer-
ican religious symbols in a syncretic manner as well as those who are
inspired by only one of these cultural sources will be highlighted. Empha-
sis will be on twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists, particularly
those whose art work coincided with social movements of the 1960s
through the 1990s that referenced black nationalism, pan-Indian identity
in the United States, indigenismo in Latin America and the United States
Southwest, women’s liberation, and identity politics in general.
In Native American cultures the arts, beauty, spirituality, and
activism are intertwined as symbols of the spiritual and physical worlds
that enrich daily lives and ceremonies. As protectors and reminders of the
living universe, symbols bridge the gap between the spiritual and physical
realms. Public life brings together dancing, poetry, and the visual arts,
uniting them in a single function; ritual serves as the all-embracing expres-
sion of life. Contemporary Native American women artists explore ancient
art traditions, styles developed during colonialism and reservation con-
finement, and newer, experimental art concepts. Their art often functions
181
182 PHOEBE FARRIS
as social criticism by using content that expresses alienation from the dom-
inant American culture. Whether the work is abstract in form or more rep-
resentational, it usually has a social context.
In looking at the art of African American women from the 1960s
and continuing today, it is evident that many have been inspired by sym-
bols from ancient Egyptian culture such as pyramids, ankhs, and hiero-
glyphs, west African cosmology from Benin/Nigeria and Asante/Ghana,
and Islamic cultural influences from North Africa. African traditions are
often expressed visually through the syncretism of Christianity, Native
American beliefs, Judaism, and Muslim traditions in a shamanistic
approach to art that stresses the sacredness of nature, the healing power of
art, and racial/ethnic identity restoration. Women artists from mixed cul-
tural/racial backgrounds often incorporate religious/spiritual motifs from
the array of Native American beliefs still prevalent in the Americas despite
conversions to Christianity.
For women artists in the United States such as Yolanda Lopez,
Amalia Mesa-Bains, Adrienne Hoard, and Betye Saar, the eagle, the
Egyptian pyramid and ankh (cross), and the Virgin of Guadalupe have
meanings that signify “solidarity by suturing the heroic and the ordinary,
the real and the spiritual, the local and the spiritual, the local and the
global, the past and the present, man and woman, Mexican and Chicano
or Chicana, African American and African, and all Third World peoples”
(High 1997, 127).
LATIN AMERICAN WOMEN ARTISTS
Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth

century the Latin American aesthetic was “revolutionized and condi-
tioned by political unrest, social circumstances, avant-garde groups, the
search for a national identity, tenuous cultural boundaries, struggles of
independence, the colonization of pre-Hispanic peoples, the influx of
blacks from Africa, the infiltration of European traditions, crossbreed-
ing, and racial integration” (Sánchez 1999, 126). The only European tra-
dition that had a significant impact was surrealism, and in Latin Amer-
ica surrealism fused with indigenous spiritual, mythological, and cultural
traditions.
The paintings of Tarsila do Amaral and Tilsa Tsuchiya acknowledge
the aesthetics and spirituality of their indigenous roots in Brazil and Peru
respectively, incorporating modern surrealism with native beliefs. In Mex-
Native, Latin, and African American Women’s Art 183
ico Frida Kahlo’s influences were pre-Columbian imagery, syncretic folk

Catholicism, and surrealism.
A contemporary artist who is especially proficient in fusing both
African and Native American religious symbols in a syncretic manner is
Regina Vater. Working in both the United States and her native Brazil,
Vater’s installations and videos embrace the hybridization of European,
African, and American Indian beliefs with an emphasis on nature’s sacred
forces. Vater references the metaphysical and shamanistic rituals of
indigenous and African traditions as they connect to the sacredness of
nature—making art that is both modern and organic/natural, art that is
created not just for aesthetic purposes but also for its energy fields
(Sánchez 1999, 126).
Examples of Vater’s work that highlight her use of syncretism are
Verve (1997), an installation influenced by African ground paintings and
Navajo sand paintings that uses corn, rice, and beans to create a spiral
Jaguar’s eye symbolic of Afro-Brazilian healing and Magi (O)cean (1970),
an installation on a beach in Rio de Janeiro that used syncretic represen-
tations of the rainbow snake, Oturmaré, goddess of hope, which in
Catholicism is called “Nossa Senhora de Aparecida” (the black Madonna).
In her writings and her multimedia visual art expressions, Regina
Vater emphasizes that the African spirit is everywhere in Brazil—in the
food, the words, the sensorial spirituality, the endurance under adverse
conditions, the music, the freedom of bodily movements, and so on.
Vater herself describes this: “For the African culture, the body acts as a
stage for our emotions, or connection to the life energy . . . our creativ-
ity and the primordial tool of our spirituality. Through the African tra-
dition (which survived in Brazil through the strategy of syncretism) . . .
the Africans blended their ancient gods with symbols taken from
Catholicism, Judaism, and the Native American and Muslim traditions”
(Vater 1997, 72).
In the United States, Mexico, and her homeland, Cuba, Ana
Mendieta incorporated the symbols of Afro-Cuban Santería with feminist
beliefs of “the personal is political” in earthworks and performance art
that utilized dirt, vegetation, fire, water, blood, gunpowder, and her own
body. Mendieta’s Silueta series that began in the seventies consisted of
archetypal female figures cut, drawn, and impressed into the earth. Other
series involved Mendieta lying nude in an Aztec grave, covered in flowers
and white grave clothes to symbolize indigenous burial bundles. During
visits to Cuba in the eighties, Mendieta carved female deities on the walls
of the Jaruco caves, an ancient indigenous Taino spiritual site. In her art
184 PHOEBE FARRIS
“the female outline remained its focus, burned, drawn, and carved on
leaves, bark paper, and logs, or molded from mud, which then parched
and cracked. In 1985 Mendieta met her death, and the earth, falling from
a high window in an eerie echo of her art” (Lippard 1990, 86).
Chicana artist Yolanda López uses the Virgin of Guadeloupe as a
major figure in her art, deconstructing the Virgin’s passivity as a suffer-
ing Indian/mestiza Christian and transforming her into a contemporary
active indigenous image. In 1978 López created a triptych of portraits
showing herself, her mother, and her Indian grandmother as the Virgin
of Guadeloupe with the cape or mantle of stars and the sun-ray body
halo that are the Virgin of Guadeloupe’s traditional attributes. However,
López also added a snake to each image and featured herself running
with her face gazing straight ahead. The Virgin of Guadeloupe, a syn-
cretic figure, became an icon of motherhood and mestizaje, “a traditional
figure who emerged only fifteen years after the Conquest as the Chris-
tianized incarnation of the Aztec earth and fertility goddess Tonantzin
and heiress to Coatlicue, the Lady of the ‘Snaky Skirt,’ in her role as
blender of dualities. López perceives the Guadeloupe as an instrument of
social control and oppression of women and Indians. She points out that
the Church tried to suppress the ‘Indian Virgin’ and only accepted her
when her effectiveness as a Christianizing agent became clear” (Lippard
1990, 42). Influenced by the Chicano and civil rights movements,
Yolanda López feels that creating art is a means for her to practice good
citizenship—a method for challenging stereotypes about Mexicans and
raising public consciousness. Also a writer, López coauthored (with
Moira Roth) the chapter “Social Protest . . . Racism and Sexism” (Broude
and Garrard 1995).
AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN ARTISTS
There is no one monolithic African American art, but within the work of
individual African American artists one finds the embodiment of what it
means to be black or African American, in all its complexities. For the
purposes of this chapter, black or African American refers to people of
African descent whose lives have been impacted by some or all of the fol-
lowing factors: the transatlantic slave trade, European colonialism, West-
ern imperialism, racism, and global dispersion.
Although at times indistinguishable from the cultural forms of
other American ethnic/racial groups, African American styles of wor-
ship, performance, music, the visual arts, and literary expression usually
stand out among American cultural products, representing a common
vision that resonates in the black Diaspora. This common cultural
vision is evident in a black aesthetic—“the name for a collection of
philosophical theories about the arts of the African Diaspora: an aes-
thetic grounded in the idea of a new, that is, a post-Emancipation and
postcolonial black identity which, from Jazz Age Harlem . . . to the
sound system of south central Los Angeles, thrives in black communi-
ties where artistic creativity and performance are the basic cultural cur-
rencies” (Farris 1999). The black aesthetic can also be characterized not
only as alternative to its mainstream counterparts but also as proactive
and aggressive in its desire to articulate, testify, and bear witness to that
cultural difference (Farris 1999).
The following are some of the twentieth-century African American
women artists who have incorporated African spirituality into their aes-
thetic expression: Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998), who studied masks
from non-Western countries, visited eleven African countries to conduct
research on the continent’s art and artists, and following her marriage to
a Haitian incorporated Afro-Haitian Voodoo symbols and other aspects
of Haitian culture into her art; Betye Saar, whose interests in astrology,
palmistry, Tarot, voodoo, and shamanism influence her mixed-media
assemblages that deal with the similarities of religions in Africa, Asia, and
Latin America; her daughter Alison Saar, who worked as an art conser-
vator repairing icons and pre-Columbian and African objects, which led
to a career as a sculptor creating imagery influenced by vodun, Santería,
Mexican altars, and Native American totem poles; and Lorraine
O’Grady, an African American whose parents emigrated to the United
States from Jamaica. O’Grady’s performance piece, Nefer titi/Devonia
Evangeline (1980) included a ritual reenacted from the Egyptian Book of
the Dead and also critiqued inauthentic African religious practices in the
United States.
Artist Adrienne Hoard is known for her shaped canvases, which
have progressed from hard-edged geometric perimeters to free-form
organic shapes of brilliant saturated color with sources from African and
Native American histories of abstraction and universal spiritual cos-
mologies. Also an educator and scholar, Hoard’s research into the psy-
chology of visual perception of color and shape and linkages between
visual abstraction and various indigenous aesthetics has had a profound
impact on her development as a painter and her career in photography
and design.
186 PHOEBE FARRIS
Hoard’s intuitive feel for color can be traced to early family experi-
ences in homes where abundant color, ceramic figures, artifacts, and music
dominated the atmosphere. Her paternal grandfather, who imigrated to
the United States from the Caribbean in the 1890s, and his wife, her pater-
nal grandmother who was Blackfoot/Siksika, shared an oral storytelling
tradition in which inanimate objects become animate, and animals could
speak. Their spirituality included her grandfather’s Christianity and her
grandmother’s memories of pre-Christian Siksika religion based on solar
ceremonies and colorfully patterned religious paraphernalia—influences
that later impacted Hoard’s cosmological paintings (Farris 1999).
During the 1980s, research travel to Korea, Italy, Brazil, and Peru
greatly influenced Hoard’s painting themes, culminating in the series
Tribal Birds, Cosmic Movements, and Etruscan Voyage. In 1989, she pre-
sented a paper on black aesthetics at the Third International Symposium
on Art Teaching and Its History in São Paulo, Brazil. During the late
nineties Hoard again traveled to Brazil and also to South Africa. While in
Brazil she gave a paper at the Afro-Latin American Research Association
and met Bahian (Brazilian priestesses), and in Pretoria she interacted with
Ndebele women artists. Both groups of women create abstract, colorful
altar forms that represent visual and spiritual traditions relevant to female
deitites and guardian spirits.
Hoard’s photo-documentation and watercolor studies of these Afro-
Brazilian and South African altar forms were the inspiration for her Gate
Mothers series: Bahia IV: Birdwoman, Trumphet Dancer, Dark Lady Dance,
The Dance of Innocence, and The Dance Weavers. Spiritually Adrienne
Hoard describes the Gate Mothers as a tribute to divine guardian spirits,
an offering to black women healers and artists in Brazil, South Africa, and
the Diaspora.
Martha Jackson-Jarvis is noted for mixed-media installations that
explore aspects of African, African American, and Native American spir-
ituality, environmental issues, and the roles of women in preserving
indigenous cultures. Her use of broken pottery shards and other objects
strewn on the floor in site-specific installations is inspired by her grand-
mother’s practice of placing crockery and pottery shards on family
graves. This southern burial tradition is based on African concepts of
preparing souls for the afterworld. Other southern traditions that influ-
enced Jackson-Jarvis’ later art development were associations with the
use of clay by Native Americans and the belief that Native American
spirits are always present in land that is now known as the United States
(Wasserman 1999, 357).
Jackson-Jarvis describes her clay pieces as “power objects.” Pieces

that resemble skeletons of underwater life are arranged in environments
of sand, wood, and other natural substances, covering the ground in a cir-
cular formation and then extending to the walls. Works from this phase
of her career are The Time Gathers, The Gathering and Arc of the Southern
Sun, and the 1988 Gathering—an installation forty feet in diameter con-
sisting of fired and glazed clay forms, broken dishes, and architectural
tiles—links to African-derived funeral rituals.
In the 1990s Jackson-Jarvis shifted away from installations and
began constructing free-standing sculptural forms and wall relief sculp-
tures. The 1993 series Last Rites Sarcophagi II included seven coffin-
shaped tables titled Plants, Earth, Air, Water, Healing, Blood, and Ancestor
Spirits. Created with clay, slate, glass, copper, cement, and wood, this
environmental series deals with earth’s potential destruction, life cycles,
and the interconnectedness of humans, animals, and nature.
Jackson-Jarvis eschews the dichotomies between “high art” versus
crafts and utilitarian art versus “art for art’s sake.” Her respect for pottery,
an earth-based art form usually created by women in tribal societies is taken
out of its usual practical application and applied to so-called intellectual for-
mats such as conceptual art or installations. However, the spiritual aspect of
her art links it back to traditional African and Native American cultures that
do not separate art and religion, art and healing. Also, the theoretical basis
of installation art that demands a temporary location and eventual destruc-
tion or recycling has parallels with Native American healing practices such
as Navajo sandpainting. It is interesting to note some of the commonalities
between traditional African and Native American art and contemporary
commonalities expressed by artists such as Jackson-Jarvis (Powell 1997, 15).
Compared to Hoard’s and Jackson-Jarvis’s synthesis of African,
Native American, and Latin American visual expressions of spirituality,
Renée Stout is more grounded in a specifically African spiritual/art/heal-
ing context—that of the Kongo Minkisi. In the 1980s Stout started mak-
ing medicine bundles or charms similar to objects used in Kongo and
voodoo rituals. In contrast with many of the fetishes, which are small,
Fetish no. 2 (1988) is life sized and functions as a psychic self-portrait and
as a power figure. “The figure is a female nude with medicine pouches
resting around her shoulders and other medicines encased in her belly.
Stout becomes a Nkisi as an expression of self-empowerment and a link
between her present, past, and future. Minkisi represent the connection
between the material world and the spiritual world of the ancestors”
(Powell 1997, 15).
188 PHOEBE FARRIS
Interested in exploring the past and reconstructing a cultural iden-

tity, Stout blends the past with the present and reality with fiction; incor-
porating objects from the lives of friends and relatives she creates assem-
blages and installations that are influenced by voodoo and Kongo
religious beliefs. She Kept Her Conjuring Table Very Neat (1990) is a table
covered with roots, herbs, bones, and a photograph of a real person that
is reconstructed into a fictional narrative. In addition to her interests in
African art, culture, and religion, Stout researches African American root
stores, spiritualists, palm readers, and folk medicine to better understand
African spiritual retentions in African American culture.
NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN ARTISTS
Five hundred years after the arrival of Columbus in the “New World,” the
cultural influences acting on Native American art remain varied and com-
plex. Many aesthetic changes have taken place in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries as native peoples have participated more fully in the
dominant culture and incorporated artistic traditions from the United
States, Europe, and other parts of the globe into their own traditions.
Native American artists are in the process of developing new definitions
of Indian art. Any insistence that Indian art remain “traditional” as a way
of preserving culture is a form of cultural discrimination because cultures
are dynamic, not static. Although contemporary Native American culture
has lost some of its symbolism and rituals because of assimilation, its
essence remains. Native American thinking has never separated art from
life, what is beautiful from what is functional. The Native American aes-
thetic has survived colonialism, servitude, racial discrimination, and rapid
technological change.
Today many people are familiar with the so-called traditional Indian
school of painting associated with the Santa Fe, New Mexico school of
Dorothy Dunn—a flat shaded treatment of historic native imagery often
identified in the public’s mind as “real Indian art.” The 1960s may be
considered the turning point, when Native American artists began to
break away from this so-called white-influenced “traditional” painting
style and began to develop and define their own visual, literary, and per-
forming arts. Like all other aspects of Indian culture, women were in the
forefront of this transition, with Helen Hardin, Pablita Velarde’s daugh-
ter, being a pioneer in the 1970s. The Institute of the American Indian
Arts (IAIA), founded in 1962, nurtured many of today’s significant
women visual artists such as Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw), Rox-

anne Swentzell (Santa Clara Pueblo), and poet/musician Joy Harjo
(Muskogee Creek).
I am not able in the space of one chapter to discuss all of the con-
temporary Native American women artists who have impacted the twen-
tieth and twenty-first centuries, only a small percentage. Contemporary
Native American women artists with varying visions such as Emmi
Whitehorse (Navajo), Kay Walking Stick (Cherokee), Jane Ash Poitras
(Cree), Nora Naranjo-Morse (Santa Clara Pueblo), Gail Tremblay
(Onandaga/Micmac), Hulleah Tsinhahjinnie (Navajo, Seminole, and
Creek), Jean LaMarr (Pauite/Pit River), Shelley Niro (Mohawk), Rose
Powhatan (Pamunkey), Sara Bates (Cherokee), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
(Enrolled Flathead Salish, member of the Confederated Salish and Koote-
nai Nation), and yours truly, Phoebe Farris (Powhatan), just to mention
a few, are dealing with issues such as the environment, genocide, native
spirituality, racism, and feminism.
Nadema Agard (Lakota/Powhatan/Cherokee) is a visual artist as
well as a repatriation consultant, museum educator, and performance
artist. She uses all of these roles to enhance and proliferate multicultural
Native American art, adapting to new challenges and new worldviews
while still maintaining an indigenous perspective. As a syncretist with a
pan-Indian view of native art/religion/culture, Agard incorporates sym-
bolism from a variety of native cosmologies—the Southwest, the Plains,
the Southeast, the Northeast, the Great Lakes Woodlands, and
Mesoamerica. In the early 1990s much of Agard’s paintings, transforma-
tional boxes, and installations honored the belief systems of Mesoamerica,
that is, the syncretism of the Aztec and Catholic religions now practiced
by Mexican Indians, Mexican mestizos, and U.S. Chicanos. Her Virgin of
Guadeloupe Is the Corn Mother (42” x 60” acrylic/canvas mixed media)
addressed the image of the Virgin of Guadeloupe as also Tonatzin (Aztec
mother of God). The Aztec adaptation to Catholicism ensured the hid-
den survival of Aztec beliefs. Nadema describes this piece as demonstrat-
ing the power of tribal art as a “vehicle for cultural and political resistance
and a spiritual grounding for a world that has become unbalanced.”
Agard’s newer series produced in the late 1990s, Starblanket Heaven,
is dedicated to her paternal family on the Standing Rock reservation. The
star motif of the art works is based on star blankets or morning star quilts.
The star, an ancient Lakota symbol, is also sacred to Christians as the star
that guided the Wise Men to the infant Jesus. When converting to
Catholoism, the Lakota adapted the star quilts of the missionaries as a
190 PHOEBE FARRIS
way to continue their own religious ceremonies. Agard’s traveling exhibit

consists of soft sculpture pieces, mixed media, and pastels. The colors
used throughout the show relate to the four directions and the four races
of humanity; north is white/Caucasian, south is yellow/Asian, east is
red/Native American, and west is blue or black/African, as believed by the
Lakota peoples. An artist/scholar with what she calls a “multivision,”
Agard hopes that her work will promote balance and respect for all reli-
gions, all races, all cultures, male and female.
Helen Hardin (Santa Clara Pueblo) successfully combined the
imagery, composition, and color common among traditional Indian
painters with a geometric abstraction of shapes, colors, and composition.
Geometry gave her linear structure and a method of investigating light,
space, and color. Hardin was also influenced by the sense of detail and
cultural heritage displayed in the work of her mother, the renowned artist
Pablita Velarde. In 1975 Hardin was the only woman artist in a Public
Broadcasting System (PBS) film series about Native American artists. By
1976 her role as a leader in contemporary Native American art was being
recognized as her work grew in depth and complexity. Hardin worked on
a Kachina series through the 1970s and into the 1980s. Considering
kachinas (intermediaries responsible for rain, corn, and fecundity) to be
her spiritual forebears, Hardin painted them as cloud people. During the
early 1980s Hardin embarked on a series of paintings and etchings with
themes relating to women. These include Bountiful Mother, Medicine
Woman, Listening Woman, Winter Woman, and Creative Woman. Chang-
ing Woman (1981), executed as both a painting and an etching, is con-
sidered one of her most ambitious works—a self-portrait of the artist as a
young woman and ageless kachina. With Hardin’s women series, the con-
nection between kachinas, humanity, and herself is clarified. In 1984
Hardin died from breast cancer, leaving uncompleted her final work, Last
Dance of the Mimbres.
Strongly interested in women’s rights in marriage and reproduction,
Carm Little Turtle (Apache/Tarahumara) uses photography to visually
explore relationships between men and women, feeling that the way peo-
ple relate to the opposite sex on a personal level carries over into politics.
The Earthman series is her most popular and widely shown theme on that
topic. In these hand-painted sepia-toned photographs, Little Turtle, her
husband, Ed Singer, and other relatives are actors/characters in a variety
of staged scenes. In Earthman Thinking about Dancing with Woman from
Another Tribe (1991), Earthman, symbolic of any man, is seated with his
back turned away from the woman, his face cupped in his hand, elbow
resting on his knee. He is looking downward, deep in thought and ignor-

ing the sexy, voluptuous woman next to him. The woman’s body is
cropped to the waist. The viewer sees a red parasol covering her stomach
and a pair of legs covered in skin-tight, leopard-spotted dance leotards.
She stands precariously in spike-heeled shoes on the edge of a cliff. The
artist seems to be saying that regardless of how attractive women try to
make themselves, men often think of other women instead of appreciat-
ing their own partners. In She Was Used to Abiding by Her Own Decisions
(1989), the woman’s profile is partially hidden by a parasol, and the man’s
face is completely obscured by a hat. While the woman is looking away,
her partner ties the laces of her shoes together, thus attempting to hinder
the woman’s mobility and independence.
In addition to visually exploring indigenous perspectives on spiritual-
ity, feminism, and identity, another major concern for many Native Ameri-
can artists is the environmental destruction of Turtle Island, the Native
American name for North America. As an artist, curator, and political
activist, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Enrolled Flathead Salish, member of the
Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) is a role model for many Native
American artists and for all artists with a consciousness. Her multimedia
paintings, which incorporate sign language, glyphs, pictograms, and collage,
are concerned with issues such as the environment, sovereignty, racism, and
sexism. Her public art commissions in which she collaborates with other
artists address the same issues, focusing on regionally specific concerns.
Design, color, line, and other elements are used by Quick-to-See Smith to
portray present-day realities as well as what is spiritual and beyond the mate-
rial world conceived by Western culture. Abstract and narrative, the symbols
found in her art such as teepees, horses, headdresses, sweet grass, indigenous
plants, the human figure, and petroglyphs, tell stories about Native Ameri-
can life in general as well as her own personal stories. Her inhabited land-
scapes show powerful movement within a geometric space, combining styles
as diverse as nineteenth-century Plains Indian art ledger books, abstract
expressionism, and cubism from the geometry found in native cultures.
A former member of Greenpeace, the environmental group, Jaune’s
work focuses strongly on environmental issues because she feels that the
earth’s destruction is one of the—if not the—most pressing global con-
cerns. She has taken a stand against using art materials that pollute the
environment, take excessive storage space, and are costly to ship. One of
her environmental series is based on the Salish/Flathead history of mak-
ing parfleches (a rawhide suitcase folded like an envelope to carry food,
clothing, etc.). Called The Nomad Manifesto, it consists of 15” x 15”
192 PHOEBE FARRIS
folded squares that carry messages about the environment and Indian life.
They are made from rag paper (no trees) and biodegradable materials
such as Sumi Japanese watercolors, charcoal, rice paper, and rice glue.
Challenging misconceptions about indigenous culture, Jaune uses her art,
lectures, and writing to educate the dominant culture and to reeducate
native peoples.
Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee) has achieved national and interna-
tional success through her art as well as her thought-provoking writings
and lectures on contemporary Native American art. A prolific painter
since the mid-1970s, WalkingStick’s notoriety emerged in the 1980s
when she began painting abstract, surreal landscapes on a diptych format.
Her use of diptych panels for her paintings is connected to the way she
perceives life and art. For her, it is important that the two portions are
connected yet still have some mystery surrounding their relationship.
These two portions are often portrayed as opposite concepts in which one
panel becomes a continuation of the other. In addition to paint, Kay’s sur-
faces contain dirt, metal shavings, pottery shards, small rocks, and wax
that is cut and gouged to reveal the layers below the surface. In the
nineties WalkingStick introduced copper in her work to represent the eco-
nomic urges underlying the rape of the earth. In most of the landscapes,
one side is more realistic, with recognizable mountains, water, and terrain,
whereas the other is more abstract or geometric. The diptychs also repre-
sent WalkingStick’s biraciality, unifying the two sides of living in an
Indian and non-Indian world.
WalkingStick’s Where Are the Generations? (1991, copper, acrylic,
wax, oil on canvas, 28” x 50”) is a haunting landscape that has many lay-
ers and is both concrete and specific and metaphysical. The right side of
the canvas is a rugged, mountainous, desert landscape. On the left panel
a small receding circle is centered on the canvas. The circle is a landscape
with cloud formations on the horizon and murky waters. Within the
cloud formations and almost hidden is printed: “In 1492 we were 30 mil-
lion. Now we are 2 million. Where are the children? Where are the gen-
erations? Never born.” Having both modern, formal qualities and an
indigenous political message, this painting, like many of WalkingStick’s
works, reflects both her Western-trained art background and her native
sensibility.
Rose Powhatan is an enrolled member of the Pamunkey tribe. The
Pamunkey was once the leading tribe in the Powhatan Confederacy, which
covered Virginia, Washington, D.C., and parts of Maryland and North
Carolina. Thematically there is a constant thread that runs throughout
Powhatan’s work; respect for indigenous culture and a commitment to pre-

senting the Pamunkey tribe and the Powhatan Confederacy in a positive,
reverent, uplifting mode of visual art expression. As a visual artist and sto-
ryteller Rose uses a narrative approach to her subject because she feels that
Eastern Algonquin tribes have not been given full respect in regard to
being included as part of the picture in Indian country.
Powhatan makes use of traditional Eastern Woodlands indigenous
design concepts in her work. The authenticity of her work demands
involvement in research to document the legitimacy of cultural reten-
tions. There is a decided sense of place inherent in Powhatan’s work—a
self-explanatory art that establishes who she is, where she is from, and
what she is about. A work that is definitely about a sense of place is Totems
to Powhatan, a 1988 installation that Powhatan and her husband, artist
Michael Auld, created as a METROART commission. The work, con-
sisting of a series of wood totem figures standing in a circle, was exhibited
for one year at the Vienna, Virginia, Metro station. The carved heads on
the totem poles represent various Powhatan Confederacy chiefs, and the
black and red engraved designs portray significant symbols such as
Powhatan’s mantle, deer, Pamunkey-Powhatan picture writing, and circles
representing the original tribes of the Confederacy.
Powhatan is also engaged in research focusing on the retention of
indigenous culture in the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. She
has found a commonality of cultural expression among Australian Abo-
rigines, New Zealand Maoris, Dominican Caribs, and North American
indigenous peoples that transcends national boundaries. For Powhatan,
respect for traditional cultural values is the tie that she sees binding all
indigenous peoples together in their art.
Since the late 1980s most of my art exhibits and slide presentations
deal with my documentation of contemporary Native American culture
east of the Mississippi River and the Caribbean. I have traveled to pow-
wows and other cultural events, interacting with relatives, friends, and the
public at the Rankokus Powhatan-Renape Reservation in New Jersey, the
Pamunkey and Mattaponi Reservations in Virginia, the Chickahominy
Tribal Cultural Center in Virginia, the Haliwa-Saponi Cultural Center in
North Carolina, Pembroke State University in North Carolina (founded
and operated by the Lumbee tribe until taken over by the state), the Shin-
necock Reservation in Long Island, New York, and the Piscataway camp-
ground in Maryland.
My photographs at these events of people dressed in both powwow
regalia and everyday clothing reveal the diversity prevalent among eastern
194 PHOEBE FARRIS
tribes, with some contemporary Native Americans resembling their early

ancestors, others showing the results of intermixture with other races. The
regalia that the photographs show is a blend of the Plains Indian pan-
Indian styles and more tribal specific clothing such as the turkey feather
headdresses worn by Powhatan chiefs that stand straight up rather than
fan out like Plains Indian eagle headdresses.
Also, as part of this series, is photo documentation of reconstructed
colonial Native American villages on the Pamunkey Reservation in Vir-
ginia and the Rankokus Powhatan-Renape Reservation in New Jersey. The
photographs show the various stages of building traditional homes with
willow branches, tree bark, and shrubbery. Rankokus Powhatan-Renape
Nation, New Jersey (1995–2000), a series of photographs of the largest
grouping in a wooded setting, has a timeless quality, with only the color
photography to remind the viewer that they are contemporary images.
I have also photographed people of native ancestry in Puerto Rico,
Cuba, and Mexico. Not recognizing externally imposed national bound-
aries, I refer to all of the Americas as “Indian Country.” I have been
inspired in my research by fellow Powhatan intellectual Jack D. Forbes,
professor emeritus of Native American Studies at the University of Cali-
fornia, Davis, and my approximately twenty-eight or more relatives who
have careers in the arts and mass media, including Pamunkey painter
Georgia Mills Jessup, who is represented in the permanent collection of
the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Our family’s artistic expres-
sion is influenced by our own Powhatan-Pamunkey heritage, intermar-
riages with other racial/ethnic groups (African American, Caribbean, and
Asian), and our collections of Pamunkey pottery, Japanese Raku pottery,
and Oriental rugs. I am fond of saying that we were multicultural before
it became a commodified fad and politically correct.
CONCLUSION
Native American and other women of color have expanded the scope of
politically significant art through a syncretism that embraces visual
expressions of feminism, the environment, spirituality, and identity
through linkages with Turtle Island (North America), Latin America, the
Caribbean, and Africa. Working in a myriad of media and styles, they are
researching the fusion of past and current history, of gender and race,
deconstructing stereotypical mainstream representations of their identi-
ties as women and persons of color.
In looking back to pre-Columbian heritages, Latin Americans,

United States Chicanos, and some African American artists embraced
and reclaimed ancestral Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, Taino, and indigenous
North American pyramids, mound cultures, sculptures, murals, myths,
and healing practices. Latin American and Chicano artists in particular
sought spiritual and cultural links to civilizations and identities that
existed prior to their mestizo transformations. For women artists the Vir-
gin of Guadeloupe’s pre-Christian Indian identities became sources for
artistic expression.
In looking back to an African heritage, African American artists
from the United States and Latin American artists from Brazil and Cuba
discovered Egyptian pyramids and religious death rituals, western and
central African masks and healing ceremonies, and South African altar art
forms. And in their discoveries artists found cultures that did not separate
art from healing, art from spirituality—art from life in general. In look-
ing at their current cultures artists found memories of Africa in southern
United States burial traditions and folk customs and Latin
American/Caribbean Santería, Candomble, and vodun. African spiritual
traditions from the past and contemporary syncretic manifestations have
been the inspiration for much of the art produced by African Americans
and peoples of African descent or mixed heritage in Latin America and
the Caribbean.
Where does the art of Native American women belong in a plural-
istic, postmodern, poststructuralist world that allegedly allows for cul-
tural/ethnic/racial fluidity and hybridity? In the various postism worlds,
the concept of ‘identity’ is undergoing profound changes, as is the con-
cept of ‘high/fine art’ versus ‘low/popular art.’ Native American women
artists and intellectuals, along with Native American men, are in the
process of developing new definitions of Native American art and redefin-
ing Native American ethnic heritages. Native American women have
always been an integral part of the creative vision and continue to con-
tribute to Indian aesthetics independently, in collaboration with other
women, and in tandem with Native American men.
The ways in which women artists of color from a variety of back-
grounds attempt to maintain and creatively express their oppositional
stances to racism, sexism, environmental destruction, religious intoler-
ance, and other socio-political problems vary. Many of them bravely
refuse to compromise the quality or content of their work for prestige
or financial rewards. Whether working for grassroots arts organiza-
tions, creating public murals, or working within the establishment as
196 PHOEBE FARRIS
art educators, museum professionals, etc., the artists profiled in this

paper and the numerous others highlighed in my book (1999), have
maintained their specific community ties and in some cases involved
themselves in national/international coalitions with other people of
color. Regardless of their divergent paths, a commonality shared by all
is healing power of art.
9
Dalit Women’s Literature
A Sense of the Struggle
Nandita Gupta
DALIT WOMEN’S WRITINGS:

A SENSE OF THE STRUGGLE
At a very broad level the Indian caste system refers to the hierarchical divi-
sion of society based on ritual purity derived from lifestyles and heredi-
tary occupations traditionally monopolized by the members of various
caste groups. This hierarchy was sanctioned by religious texts. Dalit refers
to the social groups defined as outcastes by the dominant caste groups.
The dalit were also called “untouchables” because they are considered too
polluted to even touch and represented the lowest orders of the caste sys-
tem in India. These “outcastes” performed tasks considered most degrad-
ing and impure (such as sweeping, washing, scavenging, leatherwork, etc.)
and were denied the most basic human rights. The position of dalits is
comparable to the blacks in apartheid-ridden South Africa and the United
States in the early nineteenth century.
Dalit mobilization in the twentieth century has been one of the
most significant social efforts for greater democratization of society, and
literature is one arena where dalit assertion has made its explosive pres-
ence felt. However, underlying the ideology of protest and change in dalit
(or any other) literature are more complex codes that signify gendered
spaces within society. It is my claim that in their writings dalit women
“talk differently” (Guru 1995, 2549) from their male counterparts and
that, consequently, issues of gender need to be specially highlighted in the
study of their works. I use dalit women’s writings as a text from which to
extract, explore, and map out elements of their consciousness. I have
197
198 NANDITA GUPTA
attempted to place them firmly within the literary discourse in which,

hitherto, they were invisible. In touching upon several themes that arise
from the available literature, I draw parallels with writings by dalit men
and hope to show areas of convergence and divergence, which help in
gleaning (in certain broad respects) some preliminary ideas of how their
consciousness is structured and informed by their sociological experience.
I also expose the absences of certain issues, which reveals numerous socio-
logical considerations.
At the outset, I must indicate several limitations of my study.
This chapter deals exclusively with twentieth-century dalit literature
from Maharashtra, a region in southwestern India, since this literature
is the most easily available in English translations. Furthermore, when
I speak of male or female writings, I deal with selected works of
selected writers. For male writings I have relied exclusively on Arjun
Dangle’s edited collection Poisoned Bread (Dangle 1992), which pro-
vides a compilation of poetry, short stories, autobiographical extracts,
and essays. Poisoned Bread presents only one work (poem/story) of each
writer. When I speak of male writers, I refer to the collective analysis
of works in Poisoned Bread exclusively as a male voice, not the entire
corpus of writings by Marathi dalit men, which would be too vast to
undertake here. Since the representation of female writings in the
anthology is too meager (itself an indication of the limited space given
to dalit writings by women), I have relied on a few articles that deal
with women’s writings exclusively. These were specially written to high-
light works of women writers that differed significantly from those of
male writers. These articles do not represent the complete oeuvre of
any woman writer. Therefore, the idea that women’s writings within
dalit literature are radically different from male writings should be
approached with some caution. I have highlighted the aspects of dif-
ference. I do not claim to present an “authentic” voice of dalit women.
An exciting find was an article on writings by Telegu women (Rani
1998). (Telegu is the name for people from Andhra Pradesh, a region
in South India.) Since this offered only a few lines of poetry by some
writers, initially I thought of excluding it from my research. Yet the
works were so strikingly different in language and treatment of the
same issues as those explored by Marathi women that I decided to
include them as a point of comparison. Though they write about sim-
ilar issues, the extremely harsh language and the stronger sense of self
of Telegu women point to a different, perhaps more brutal qualitative
experience of oppression.
Dalit Women’s Literature 199
DALIT BACKGROUND
Dalit writers and intellectuals hold Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891–1956), the

unchallenged social, political, and intellectual leader of dalits in the first
half of the twentieth century, to be the founder of the militant dalit con-
sciousness, which forged the dalit literary and political movement.
Ambedkar’s mandate of “Educate! Organize! Agitate!” rallied numerous
people. In 1950, the first batch of dalit graduates from Siddartha College
set up the Siddhartha Sahitya Sangh, a literary society, out of which the
Maharashtra Dalit Sahitya Sangh (literally—“literary society of Maha-
rashtrian dalits”) was later formed. The first conference of dalit writers
was organized in 1958 in Bombay. A period of literary outburst followed
in the forms of poetry, short stories, magazine movements, and so on.
Another decisive step, inspired by the black movement in the United
States, was the formation of the Dalit Panthers in Bombay on July 9,
1972, by youths Namdeo Dhasal, Arjun Dangle, and J. V. Pawar.
LITERATURE AS A GENDERED SPHERE:

GYNOCRITICS AND THIRD WORLD CRITICISM
The principal tenet of feminist criticism is that a literary work cannot be

understood apart from the social, historical, and cultural context within
which it is written. Feminist literary criticism sees literature as an impor-
tant arena of political struggle, a “crucial component of the project of
interrogating the world in order to change it” (Schweickhart 1989, 24).
In the wake of this development, gender has been recognized as a “crucial
determinant in the production, circulation and consumption of literary
discourse” (Showalter 1989, 1). The introduction of gender into the field
of literary studies marked a new phase in feminist criticism—an investi-
gation into the way that all reading and writing by both men and women
is marked by gender.
The emphasis on women as writers arose with “Gynocritics” or the
feminist study of women’s writings. Gynocritics assumes that all writings
by women (a) necessarily articulate a gendered experience, and (b) neces-
sarily take place within a dominant male discourse through acts of “rea-
son, appropriation and subversion” (Showalter 1989, 5). Elaine Showal-
ter has used Myra Jehlen’s argument that feminist criticism has
demonstrated the patriarchal myth of the universality of the literary “can-
non” and shown that what is called literature was actually “men’s writing”
200 NANDITA GUPTA
(1989, 5). Jehlen argued that in light of this discovery the agenda for fem-
inist criticism was a “radical comparitivism” in which texts by male and
female authors working within the same historical condition and genres
are juxtaposed to reveal the “contingency of the dominant male tradition”
(cited in Showalter 1989, 5).
The notion of an undifferentiated gynocritics was critiqued by third
world and black feminist theorists, who posited that women’s conscious-
ness and therefore writings were structured by ideologies of class, race,
and imperialism. They have highlighted the western bias of gynocritics as
a feminist ideology—“As [gynocritics] enumerates the themes and sets up
the agenda for women’s writing the world over the present day concerns
of western feminists are writ large to encompass the world, and the world
collapses into the west” (Tharu and Lalita 1995 v. 2, 26–27).
There was a recognition of the need for the interrogation of gyn-
ocritics from a third world perspective, which would analyze “patri-
archies reconstituted in the interest of Orientalism, Imperialism, the
Enlightenment, Nationalism” (Tharu and Lalita 1995 v. 2, 15). There
was also recognition that women writers are complicit in and reproduce
the ideologies of their world in their works. However, they do so from
“complexly constituted and decentered positions” (Tharu and Lalita
1995 v. 2, 38). Women do not merely receive and reproduce ideologies,
they experience and contest them as well. Women’s writings are to be
read as a sign for women’s agency in a world in which they exist on the
margins.
If we are to recognize women’s agency, their writings should be read
not for their alliances with dominant ideologies but for the “gestures of
defiance or subversion implicit in them” (Tharu and Lalita 1995 v. 2, 39).
Kumkum Sangari has pointed out (Sangari in Pawar 1996) that patri-
archies function simultaneously through coercion and through making a
wide social consensus along with obtaining differing degrees of consent
from women and are resilient because of the “consensual element in
them . . . which is open to constant and consistent reformulation” (San-
gari 1996, 17). Narratives are in a dynamic relationship between the
dominant tradition and female agency. She cautions that the “feminist
project of retrieving the agency of women . . . has often suffered from a
degree of simplification produced through the anxiety to recover a roster
of independent or rebellious women and enter them into liberatory
schemes” (1996, 25). This has resulted in an oversimplified view not only
of social structure but also of women’s agency. Sangari indicates that the
feminist purpose will be better served by “retrieving the nature of existing
potentials and constraints, in other words, ‘a sense of the struggle, which

will ultimately yield a far richer notion of women’s agency than has hith-
erto become available’”(1996, 25).
DALIT WOMEN IN SOCIETY:

MOTHER/VICTIM DICHOTOMY VERSUS
PROUD DIGNIFIED AGENTS OF CHANGE
One of the most frequently represented themes in dalit writings is that of

women as the worst victims of an exploitative system based on caste and
gender inequality. By and large, women are depicted exclusively as “vic-
tims” of either upper-caste males or more abstractly the “system.” The
roles that dalit women play within the family and society and their agency
in resistance are not depicted. This is evident in the eighteen poems
selected from Poisoned Bread for their portrayal of women. For example
Baban Chahhande’s “Labor Pains” (in Dangle 1992, 47) deals with the
economic exploitation of dalit women as laborers trapped in an endless
cycle of work unbroken even by childbirth—“When labor begins, her
head holds a load/and her eyes, a shadow of anxiety for food . . . thus she
delivers and her hands/set fiercely to work again.” A parallel theme is that
of sexual exploitation, which underscores the extreme sexual vulnerability
of the dalit female. Sudharkar Gaikwad’s The “Unfed Begging Bowl” is an
example—“Do not beg with the heart of your femininity; anyhow you
will have to prepare yourself for copulation” (1992, 25).
Intrinsic to this theme is the representation of the female body. In
men’s writings, the female body is foregrounded more often, generally in
a graphic or crude manner and constantly brought into the public gaze.
This is done for the purpose of illustrating the condition of the dalit com-
munity, of which the brutally exploited female body becomes a symbol.
For instance, Jadhav’s “Under Dadar Bridge”—“She would bray, that she
donkey of Bhadrapad/. . . brutally exposing both her nakedness/and
mine” (1992, 57).
Most of the women in poems by men that speak of the condition of
women or have a female persona are given the role of mother—a figure
that evokes pity or sympathy. Rarely is the mother given agency and indi-
viduality. In Nimbalker’s “Mother” the male poet is given the space for
self-confirmation—“Even now my eyes search for mother . . . when I see
a thin woman with firewood on her head/I go and buy all her firewood”
(1992, 36). Occasionally, the mother figure is an instrument for a savage
202 NANDITA GUPTA
condemnation of a brutal society, where she becomes wild, uncontrolled,

animallike—“She was engrossed in pulling out hunks/from the cat-
flesh . . . [and] her eyes were sharp like the razor edge/that scalps the
world/. She would take the scab off the green wound/and show me the
ancient leprosy/coursing through her blood” (1992, 57).
This context makes Jyoti Lanjewar’s mother figure in her poem
“Mother” all the more remarkable (in Zelliot 1996). The poem consists
of snapshot images of the life of a woman laborer—hard at work build-
ing skyscrapers, roads, and dams and bringing up children alone. Lanje-
war depicts her burdened character as having pride—“rejecting the scraps
of food offered to you/with pride”; agency—“chasing anyone who nudged
you deliberately/with your sandal in your hand” (1996, 82); a proud sense
of being responsible for future generations—“taking the little bundle from
the cradle to your breast/saying, “study, become an Ambedkar.”
In Telegu dalit women’s writing, the mother figure is universalized
and politicized on a vast scale, not personalized as it is by Mahrashtrian
writers. Swaroopa Rani highlights the fact that the labor of women pro-
vides the foundations on which the structure of society is built. Women
are the sustainers of the nation. Rani quotes her own poetry—“Mother
without your touch/there is neither air nor light/on this earth/unless your
hands delve into the/slush to catch jewel bright fish/the country’s
hunger/will remain unfed” (1998, 23).
WOMEN AND DALIT POLITICAL ASSERTION
It is significant that none of the male writers depicts dalit women as

acutely politically conscious or inspired by political leaders of their com-
munity and large participants in historic political movements that forged
the militant dalit consciousness of its times. Yet such images are an inte-
gral part of the self-identity of dalit women themselves. They proudly
claim the history of struggle of the dalit community, and there is a very
strong sense of having been important participants in it.
Jyoti Lanjewar’s “Mother” gives a glimpse of the life of a laborer
woman, who is also seen as an inextricable part of three historic events in
Maharashtra—“I have seen you/at the front of the long march . . . shout-
ing ‘change the name’/taking the blow of the police sticks on your upraised
hands/going to jail” (Zelliot 1996, 82–83). “The long march” refers to a
protest march that took place in March 1979, after the reversal of a gov-
ernment decision to rename Marathwada University in honor of Ambed-
kar. The poet too had joined the march. Marathwada is also referred to in
Mina Gajbhiyes’ “Weeping Wound of Centuries” where it becomes a trope
of revolt—“I had sutured with difficulty/the weeping wound of cen-
turies/these stitches are all ripped out/ripped out by Marathwada/. . . let
the village become a burning ground/along with me/I will not live like a
pariah dog, nowhere” (Zelliot 1996, 70). Lanjewar’s “Mother” depicts two
other important events—“I have seen you/saying when your only son/fell
martyr to police bullets/you died for Bhim, [an affectionate name for
Ambedkar] your death means something/saying boldly to the police/if I
had two or three sons, I would be fortunate/they would fight on.” This is
a reference to a death caused by police firing at a dalit youth in the Worli
riots of April 1974. There is a further reference to Diksha Bhumi—the site
of mass conversion of Mahars to Buddhism as a final rejection of the
Hindu social order in 1956 in Nagpur (a city in Maharashtra).
Hira Bansode in her poem of praise to Ambedkar entitled “O Great
Man” refers to the first and crucial movements led by Ambedkar in the
history of struggle for basic human rights, such as access to common
places of worship and sources of water. “Kala Ram and Chawdar Tank/the
history of pain/is carved on each of our hearts” (Zelliot 1996, 80). In
1927, Ambedkar led a procession to a public pond, Chawdar Tank, in an
attempt to drink water from a public source as a symbolic exercise of
rights. This resulted in caste riots and ritual cleansing of the tank by the
so-called upper castes. From 1930 through 1935, there was a fruitless and
violent movement in Nasik (a city in Maharashtra) for entry into a
famous temple, Kala Ram. Both these historic movements included large-
scale participation by women. It is extremely significant that dalit men
never depict women as part of political moments, indicating how their
political activism is negated in the male consciousness as women are rep-
resented nearly exclusively as domesticated beings.
While women write about political leaders, there is a dearth of female
figures of inspiration. This points toward an absence of women beyond
mobilization, an absence from decision-making bodies and leadership roles.
The saviors of the dalit community are held to be Ambedkdar and Jotiba
Phule (1827–1890). Jotiba Phule was a (so-called) low-caste leader and
social reformer in nineteenth-century Maharashtra. Phule, alongwith his
wife, Savitribai, started the first school for women in Maharashtra in 1848.
Savitribai was the first woman teacher in modern Maharashtra. Though she
made equal efforts for the education of dalits, especially the women, she is
not remembered with similar reverence. To a certain extent women have
internalized the notion of the role of women as ancillary to that of men.
204 NANDITA GUPTA
GENDER INEQUALITY IN DALIT SOCIETY:

CRITICISM AS WELL AS COMPLICITY OF DALIT WOMEN
It is only women’s writings that evidence a criticism of the patriarchal

practices within the dalit community. This is not a continuously overt
theme, but there are definite indications that can be gleaned from the
works of women writers. Dalit women face patriarchal control of sexual-
ity and also violence within the family. This has been illustrated by both
men and women writers. The poet Pratibha Pore deals with marital
rape—a theme never touched upon in men’s writings. Telegu women’s
writings express in much stronger terms the rage of women against patri-
archy. Chellapalli Swaroopa Rani indicts patriarchal and caste oppres-
sion—“[W]hen has my life been truly mine/in the home male arro-
gance/sets my cheek stinging/while in the street caste arrogance/splits the
other cheek open” (1998, 22). Vijay Kumari condemns not just upper-
caste male atrocities but also the gross insensitivity of the men of one’s
own caste—“[W]hen Kotti Reddy pulled your/sari in the corn field/the
humiliation/when your husband seeing your/torn sari said you were/
overfed/the shrinking of your heart” (Rani 1998, 23).
The women’s writings also touch upon an important issue that
never occurs in men’s writings, patriarchal community practices of dalits,
chiefly the practice of dedicating girl children to various goddesses, a tra-
dition that invariably turns them into devdasis (temple prostitutes). Anu-
radha Gurav condemns this in very strong language in her poem
“Request”—“We give our children to the god Khandoba/. . . of our own
free will/we make our daughters lie beneath men/we mother fuckers like
dumb beasts/hock our lives” (Zelliot 1996, 87). Strikingly, this is as vehe-
ment as the Telegu women writers, though Swaroopa Rani links it with
entire patriarchal historiography—“[M]y fame is that/I was recognized as
a whore/even as a new born babe/my story that should bring/the head of
this civilization/low into the depths of hell/in which chapter of the vol-
umes/of famous history of your country/do you intend to write it?”
(1998, 22). Here we see the emergence of a nascent dalit women’s alliance
that transcends regional boundaries, a consciousness shared with similar
intensity against an exploitation they alone face.
Conversion to Buddhism by Ambedkar in 1956 signaled a complete
rejection of the Hindu social order and of the notion of reform of the
orthodox Hindus as means to end the caste system. Buddhism therefore
held the hope for ultimate emancipation of dalits. Hira Bansode’s
“Yashodhara,” however, deals with Buddhism as no other work has done
by focusing on Buddha’s forgotten wife—“O Yashodhara . . . we were

brightened by Buddha’s light/but you absorbed the dark/. . . He went, he
conquered, he shone/while you listened to the songs of his triumph/. . .
but history doesn’t talk about/the great story of your sacrifice/a great epic
would have been written about you!/. . . I am ashamed of the
injustice/you are not found/in a single Buddhist vihara [temple]” (Zelliot
1996, 71–73). Yashodhara is seen, not just as tragic figure but also as a
woman who played a role in Buddha’s final accomplishment. Since, as
Zelliot indicates, “almost all the literature written by Buddhists in the
conversion movement is by men, and the vast majority of leaders in local
Buddhist groups are men” (1992, 102), the poem is a harbinger of the
feminist consciousness, which has, in its first stirrings, begun to interro-
gate the most sacrosanct institutions.
In the representation of the male and female child, I find the norms
that marginalize females starkly depicted, and in this the women are
implicated as well. There is a marginalization of the dalit girl child in the
literary consciousness of dalit writers, male or female. Education is
extremely important to the dalit community as a tool for empowerment.
However, in women’s writing, I found only one abstract reference to the
importance of educating daughters, in Sugandha Shende’s “Ovi Pan-
chak”: “a vow that I shall send my daughters to school” (Bhaware 1980,
12). There is a sense, as Zelliot points out, of being “educators of their
sons” (Zelliot 1996, 91). Shende’s “Mourning Comes to an End” cele-
brates the end of ignorance through a male child—“And clasping the
hand of your son/take him to the village school” (Bhaware 1980, 12).
This is replicated in male writings: Waman Kardak’s poem “Send My Boy
to School,” and Prahlad Chendwankar’s “My Father” represent zeal to get
male children educated. The girl child is absent from representation and,
consequently, consciousness.
The absence of the girl child in the role of receivers of education is
striking because dalit women in general are very conscious of the impor-
tance of education. Savitribai’s letter (Tharu and Lalita 1995 v. 1,
213–14) reveals an acute consciousness of the significance of knowledge
for untouchables and women. Muktabai, a student in Phule’s school, in
an essay (Tharu and Lalita 1995 v. 1, 215–16) had drawn attention to the
specificities of the experience of lower-caste women, displaying a con-
sciousness revolutionary for its time. Two autobiographical extracts in
Poisoned Bread (the only two by women: Shantabai Kamble’s “Naja goes
to school—and Doesn’t” and Kumud Pawde’s “Story of My Sanskri”)
describe the obstacles faced by dalit women in acquiring an education,
206 NANDITA GUPTA
both within and without the family. Pawde links up her struggle with that
of Savitribai Phule—“I had begun to have some idea of what Savitribai
Phule must have endured on account of her husband Mahatma Jotiba
Phule’s zeal for women’s education” (Dangle 1992, 103).
The male child is always used as an instrument for action or resis-
tance, as for example in Lanjewar’s “Astitva”—“[O]ut of this ravenous
humanity/a sprout came forth/. . . to demolish the edifice of the rich/clos-
ing fast his little hand/My son has just opened his eyes” (Bhaware 1980,
14). This is similar to Daya Pawar’s “Blood Wave,” a man’s address to his
pregnant wife—“Fists tight . . . clenched for a blow/. . . let’s burn, scorch,
fire-harden him/in leaping flames, this phoenix/feeding on live coals/will
brave the powerful skies/and all that this nation never offered/to you or
me—the joy, the glory—/he will pull down to his feet” (Dangle 1992,
62–63). This has fuller expression in Trayambak Sapkale’s “That Single
Arm”—“[H]e sliced off/the attacker’s arm from the shoulder/Then
looked at me triumphantly” (Dangle 1992, 3). Ironically, while women’s
writings show a strong sense of political participation as a crucial compo-
nent of self-identity, pride of contribution by the next generation comes
through sons, as Lanjewar’s “Mother” shows—“If I had two or three sons,
I would be fortunate/they would fight on” (Zelliot 1996, 83).
SELF-IDENTITY OF DALIT WOMEN
Does dalit women’s self-identity focus on caste or gender; that is, do they
see themselves as dalits or as women first? The issue is complex, and there
are no clear-cut answers. Dalit women identify themselves (as do the men)
as a part of the community, but, unlike the men, not exclusively. This is sig-
nificant because dalits in general have a high level of identification with the
community. Male writers speak of oppression as dalits, but, of course, not
specifically as males. There is no consciousness of a male identity beyond
the community. For the men, self-identity stops at the boundaries of caste
consciousness. In women’s writings, self-identity strains not just at the
boundaries of society and nation but also those of the caste and family.
Hira Bansode’s famous poem “Petition” illustrates the consciousness of an
individual gendered identity—“[M]y father, my brother, my hus-
band . . ./under the weight of these well fleshed relations/my hollow exis-
tence gives way/. . . I have lost my identity/my independence, my rights,
my opinions/see how everything falls on me. In my home, in my society,
in my country/who am I if I am nobody” (Novetzke 1995, 293).
In Telegu dalit women’s writing there is an even stronger condem-

nation of patriarchy (upper caste and Dalit), which denies women’s indi-
viduality. Darisi Sasi Nirmala writes, “I am dragged/here and there/under
someone’s buttocks/a seating plank/someone or other/drags me along/by
a nose rope/to make me dance” (Rani 1998, 22). Swaroopa Rani links up
the caste system with patriarchy: “For generations I have/borne this lep-
rous caste ridden male world/. . . on my head” (italics mine). This is an
idea that has been presented in works of several theorists who have ana-
lyzed the caste system from a gendered perspective.
The women definitely see spaces for alliances among all dalit
women as a route of emancipation. Sugandha Shende’s Priya Bhagini
(“Dear sister”) celebrates a dalit sisterhood: “Priya Bhagini, awake
quick/cast your glance outside the home/you are no longer a woman
helpless and weak/you have grown strong enough to support the
world/know thyself, know thy power, and/Drive the fear out from your
hearts/. . . let the wings of ambition spread/And go on soaring high to
heaven” (Bhaware 1980, 12). Do the dalit women conceive of the possi-
bility of an overarching alliance with all women? This is a very complex
issue—the answer would be both yes and no. The relationship with
upper-caste women is highly complicated, as it is enmeshed within the
matrix of caste and gender with all its ideological, political, and social
reverberations. They are aware of both the specific nature of their oppres-
sion in which upper-caste/class women also participate, and are simulta-
neously aware of the emancipatory potential of a cross-caste/class alliance
with women. This is evident in the use of the figure of upper-caste
women in their writings. The figure of the upper-caste woman is pre-
sented in Marathi dalit women’s writing in two forms—predominantly
mythological figures but also as real women with whom they live their
everyday lives. The use of mythological figures indicates two facts—there
is a sense of solidarity with all women who have been victims of Brah-
manical (upper-caste) patriarchal oppression and also the invisibility of
dalit women figures in dominant historiography and mythology from
which such figures are drawn.
In Marathi dalit women’s writings the only mythological non-Brah-
manic reference is to Shabri in Hira Bansode’s “To Shabri” (a tribal
woman in the Indian epic Ramayan who fed the hero Lord Ram berries
she had already tasted to give him the sweetest ones—generally, a figure
of naive love and devotion). Significantly, the poet inverts the figure from
that of silent love and devotion to a speaking agent—speaking not only
for dalit men but also for upper-caste women: “[W]hy didn’t you ask
208 NANDITA GUPTA
omniscient Ram/About the heart rending sacrifice of Eklavya’s thumb [a

tribal archer in the epic Mahabharat who was asked to cut off his thumb
when he threatened to surpass the hero Arjun’s skill in archery. He is seen
as a figure of unjust emasculation of dalits]. . . . About blameless Sita’s
exile . . . [symbol of the silent, suffering yet dutiful wife who followed her
husband Ram into exile,was kidnapped by Ravan, and asked to prove her
“purity” through a trial by fire]. . . . If you had revealed the curse of your
caste I would have found fulfillment/Shabri, here you went wrong?”
(Novetzke 1995, 288).
On one level the figures of Kunti (mother of the Pandava brothers,
heroes in the Mahabharat, who abandoned her illegitimate child, Karna)
is used to express a sense of betrayal, a sense that upper-caste women are
participants in dalit women’s oppression. Therefore, at times the caste
consciousness is too strong to visualize an overarching alliance with
women. Hira Bansode’s “Sanskriti” equates Indian culture with a betray-
ing mother, Kunti—“[Y]ou denied us your motherhood./Beneath caste
dominance/You smothered our bravery” (Novetzke 1995, 284). Yet at
other times there is a complete identification with upper-caste women as
victims of a male dominant culture. Bansode’s “Petition” illustrates this—
“As thousands of Draupadi’s are stripped/Brothers don’t just sit/Bowing
your heads” (Novetzke 1995, 293–94). (Draupadi, wife of the Pandav
brothers, was set as a wager in a gambling game by her own husband and
later sought to be disrobed in public by the Pandav’s cousins and rivals.
Out of a misplaced sense of obligation to an oath given, no one attempted
to save her.) Her poem “Yashodhara” equates Yashodhara with the sacri-
ficing, silent wives of Hindu mythology—“You would have become
famous in purana and palm leaf like Sita and Savitri” (Savitri is the sym-
bol of the ideal devoted wife. She pursued the God of death and com-
pelled him to return her husband’s soul; Zelliot 1996, 72). “Slave” is a
scathing indictment of the treatment of all women in India: “When Sita
entered the fire to prove her fidelity/where Ahilya was turned to stone
because of Indira’s lust [Ahilya was tricked into cohabiting with Lord
Indra and cursed by her husband to become a stone. She was redeemed
from the curse when the footsteps of Ram fell on her]/. . . where Drau-
padi was fractured to serve five husbands [Draupadi was forced to be the
wife of the five Pandava brothers because of a chance remark by their
mother that all of them should share equally in everything]/. . . where a
woman’s identity fades like nature’s blossoms/. . . she remains in the
shadow of someone else’s light/. . . In that country a woman is still a
slave/. . . To be born a woman is unjust” (Zelliot 1996, 74–75). Dalit
women become spokespersons for women only when they focus on

oppression of gender not of caste.
Again this theme finds a much stronger expression in Telegu
women’s poetry, which demonstrates a much stronger caste and gender
consciousness among the Telegu dalit women. They see upper-caste
women as partnering with upper-caste men not only in economic but also
sexual exploitation by their silence. Swaroopa Rani says that “dalit women
have questioned and rejected caste in terms which even upper-caste
women are even today unable to do. Even women who suffer patriarchy
humiliate dalit women because they belong to a lower caste” (1998, 23),
in support of which she quotes two sections of Sasi Nirmala’s “Dalit
Uralu”—“Why speak of the other?/Another woman wants to buy me/she
wants me as the gold lace/to her upper-caste new sari/”(23)—or, more
harshly—“Do you remember/your words when/your husband plucked
me/like a chicken? Do you know how often/I was cheapened at your
hands?” (24).
There is also a critique of other anti-establishment movements in
India as “upper caste” because they enjoy a visibility not available in dalit
women struggles. There is a sarcastic reference to the Narmada Bachao
Andolan, a famous, on-going movement led by Medha Patkar (a woman)
against the Hydel project in Narmada valley that will displace thousands
of tribals in Madhya Pradesh, a region in Central India. “You peacocks of
high caste/preening your plumes/in the Narmada valley/your call echoes
and rouses/each corner of the world/but my sisters struggle/to dam the
swollen stream of arrack/choking them/their hoarse voices/will be
buried/in the Telugu earth.” The “swollen streams of arrack” refers to the
anti-arrack (country liquor) movement in Andhra, which was a fallout of
the women’s literary campaign among the poor and lower-caste women.
While the strong identification with their own liberatory movements is
laudable, the hostility toward emancipatory movements elsewhere involv-
ing ecological issues is disturbing. It points toward a regional and caste
consciousness that is too strong to join one’s struggles with those of a dif-
ferent caste.
However, Swaroopa Rani in general does condemn patriarchy in all
forms. She disagrees with dalit men who “in the course of their condem-
nation of caste have also humiliated upper-caste women” (1998, 24). She
also calls for an alliance of all women and dalits, saying that “women and
dalits have been sacrificed at the altar of Manudharma [an ancient code of
laws given by the sage Manu, which legitimized caste and gender hierarchy
and discrimination]. Women and dalits need to collectively struggle
210 NANDITA GUPTA
against a common enemy . . . that would replace Manudharma with Man-

avdharma [literally—“humanity”] (1998, 24). While there is an extremely
strong caste consciousness at the level of ground reality among women,
there is, on a more theoretical plane, a recognition of the need for an
alliance between all victims of “Brahmanism” (upper-caste ideology), irre-
spective of caste or gender.
CONCLUSION
Dalit women write differently from dalit men because of their different
sociological experience. They do not represent themselves, as the male
writers do, as mere symbols for the debasement of the dalit community.
They see themselves as speaking and acting agents for the community,
though, ironically, the focus remains on the male child as a symbol of
hope for the community. They are also conscious of an individual gen-
dered identity beyond the family and community, though this is not rig-
orously pursued. The category of “dalit” and the category of “woman” are
in constant engagement with each other, opening up spaces of both con-
vergence and divergence. As dalits, women are conscious of being victims
of caste oppression in which men and women of the upper class or caste
participate. They call for an end to this system. As women they face patri-
archal violence and control from men both of the upper caste and of their
own community. They also recognize that all women face patriarchal con-
trols, albeit in different forms. They are not conscious of any specific way
to end this, especially violence within the family and patriarchal commu-
nity practices. For this they do see spaces for alliances among women of
all castes and classes. They see themselves as exploited economically and
sexually, and to this they add the dimension of exploitation by their own
community members. Their ultimate aim, however, remains liberation of
humankind.
Part IV
Home Is Where the Art Is:
Shaping Space and Place
10
The Role of “Place” in New Zealand
Ma\ori Songs of Lament
Ailsa L. Smith
INTRODUCTION
The Ma\ori people of New Zealand have a word for “their place” in the
landscape. They call it “tu\rangawaewae” (a standing place for the feet).
Being an oral people by inclination they have a way with words, as when
orators exercise the right to which their tu\rangawaewae entitles them, to
stand on the marae (the ceremonial center of Ma\ori cultural life) and
speak of matters pertaining to that place. Similarly, women and men
expressed themselves in telling imagery in the past when they sang to ease
the intolerable burden imposed by death or other tragic loss.
The songs they sang were waiata tangi (crying songs or songs of
lament), a form of oral literature that was heavily influenced by the places
in which its composers and subjects were situated in the course of their
everyday lives. These songs were recorded in large numbers in the nine-
teenth century, when the multitudinous references they contained to peo-
ple and places in the tribal territory were topical and relevant. The mean-
ings of many “place” references have since been lost, because the overlay
of settler place names has obliterated the indigenous history those earlier
names were intended to preserve.
Today, we as Ma\ori sing waiata tangi as a mark of respect for earlier
generations. Or, rather, we sing those songs whose air or rangi has been
retained by the descendants of their composers or of the dead whose pass-
ing sparked their composition; or by the tribes who preserved them as
taonga tuku iho, treasures handed down from the past. We do not, how-
ever, speak of the past and present as if they are rigidly demarcated, for
our ancestors live on in us and in the landscape, and we are constantly
aware of their presence. This sense of the conflation of past and present
213
214 AILSA L. SMITH
as a single, comprehensible “space” is inherent in the way Ma\ori people

regard time, for we walk backward into the future with our thoughts
directed toward the coming generations but with our eyes on the past,
because that is the “seen” and “known” part of our collective experience.
Perhaps this is why we have such long memories and do not easily forget
the wrongs done to our forebears that have resulted in the mental, emo-
tional, and spiritual turmoil of recent times.
THE TREATY OF WAITANGI
In 1840 the British Crown signed a treaty with the Ma\ori tribes of New
Zealand. The English text of the Treaty of Waitangi, as it became known, was
translated into the Ma\ori language using missionary Ma\ori, which failed to
address nuances in meaning between the two languages. Although consider-
able numbers of Ma\ori were literate in their own language by this time, the
Ma\ori text of the treaty was explained orally by government treaty negotia-
tors, who added their own interpretations where necessary to maximize
Ma\ori acceptance of its terms. Compared to the more than five hundred
leaders (including some women) who signed the Ma\ori text of the Treaty,
only thirty-nine signed the English version because a copy of the Ma\ori text
was not available at the time. Were it not for these thirty-nine signatures, the
Ma\ori text of the treaty would have unquestioned authority in the eyes of the
Crown, instead of exerting a moral and persuasive force only.
The wording of the English version of the treaty differs little from
treaties that Britain had drawn up with indigenous peoples in other parts
of the world and then observed with less apparent concern for its national
integrity than for the success of its mercantile and colonizing endeavors
(Williams 1989). The difference between those treaties and the Treaty of
Waitangi is that the latter was drawn up in Ma\ori and English, the two
texts differing substantially in certain key areas. Thus, in the first article
of the English text, the Ma\ori chiefs ceded sovereignty to the Crown; in
the second, they were guaranteed full and undisturbed possession of their
lands and other domains for as long as they wished to retain them; and,
in the third, they were extended the rights and privileges of British sub-
jects. Ma\ori believed they had given the Crown ka\wanatanga (gover-
nance) over its British subjects in New Zealand (Orange 1987), that they
had been confirmed in the unqualified exercise of their rangatiratanga
(chieftainship) over their lands and other taonga (treasures), and that they
had taken on the rights and duties of British citizenship.
The Role of “Place” in New Zealand Ma\ori Songs of Lament 215
Ma\ori have since personalized the guarantees contained in the

treaty: the Queen’s regard toward the signatory chiefs as her equals; the
wording of the treaty as a sacred covenant; and the respect, amounting to
reverence, with which the document itself has been invested, with its
ancestral signatures or marks and often the moko (the representation of a
chief ’s facial tattoo) attached. Nevertheless, inconsistencies between the
Ma\ori and English texts have left the Ma\ori people with a legacy of
promises quite at variance with those understood by the settlers, the
immediate beneficiaries of the treaty.
The settlers, who gave the treaty little thought after its signing in
1840, were convinced that they had a right to settle in New Zealand by
virtue of their status as members of a self-designated “superior” race. As
such, they felt they had a duty to improve the lot of the Ma\ori people by
setting them an example of industriousness and contributing to their
material prosperity by placing an economic value upon their land and
making it a tradable commodity rather than, as it had been, a seemingly
inalienable source of tribal prestige and sustenance.
The original intention of the British Crown, in considering whether
to annex New Zealand, may have been to establish enclaves of British
influence surrounded by territories where Ma\ori customs and practices
would prevail (Ward 1973). If so, this intention was not adequately
revised when the political climate changed due to colonizing initiatives
such as those of the New Zealand Company, which overcame the more
humanitarian considerations of the time by prompting a resurgence of
Britain’s competitive, imperialistic spirit. The New Zealand Company
was responsible for a largely unregulated flood of British migrants who
arrived in New Zealand after 1840, to join those British citizens who were
already there and whose turbulent ways had obliged Britain to formalize
a treaty with Ma\ori leaders in the first place. Contrary to the expectations
of those leaders, who wished to encourage manageable trade relations
with other countries, migration led to an insatiable demand for Ma\ori
land and to increasingly bitter relations between Ma\ori and Pa\keha\ (the
Ma\ori name for settlers of Anglo-European origin).
In Taranaki, on the West Coast of the North Island, the situation
was particularly tense because much of the land appeared to be unoccu-
pied when the settlers arrived in 1841. Intertribal warfare had caused an
emptying out of the region in the preceding decades, although the land
could be reoccupied at any time under Ma\ori tribal tenure. The Taranaki
tribes began moving back to their homelands in earnest in the late 1840s,
after settlers had taken up residence on ancestral lands to the north of the
216 AILSA L. SMITH
newly established town of New Plymouth, competition for those lands

requiring that settler land entitlements be renegotiated with the tribes.
The decade that followed was marked by dissension within tribes between
those who wished to sell to the settlers and those who did not and a hard-
ening of attitudes on the part of the settlers toward a native race whom
they felt needed be taught its place in relation to the sovereign might of
the British.
The cause of the war that ensued in Taranaki in 1860 and spread to
other parts of the North Island has been variously ascribed to the demand
for land, to the assertion of British sovereignty, and to the inevitable con-
flict that resulted wherever Britain went in its colonizing endeavors. The
war between Ma\ori and the British (and later colonial) forces is generally
referred to as the “land wars,” although British determination to exert
sovereign power was an ever-present factor in deciding how the Crown
would act toward its treaty partner. Illegal land confiscations and the indi-
vidualization of land titles to facilitate the Europeanization of Ma\ori land
were part of an ongoing drive to enforce the lessons that should have been
learned from the land wars; although the reality today is that Ma\ori are as
determined as ever to regain “their place” in the landscape, in terms of
their prior occupation of the soil and their status as tangata whenua (lit-
erally, “people of the land”).
Inspired in part by the black power movement in the United States,
Ma\ori took to the streets in the 1970s, forcing the government to reex-
amine its Ma\ori policies. As a result, a commission of inquiry known as
the Waitangi Tribunal was set up to look into Ma\ori grievances over land
confiscations and unjust dealings by past governments. Following the tri-
bunal’s recommendations, millions of dollars in settlements have been
paid to various tribes. These payments by the government, in return for
the extinguishing of Ma\ori rights to claim in the future, are directed at the
settlement of grievances against the Crown for postcolonial land loss and
cultural deprivation.
Like other European countries imbued in the past with a colonizing
spirit, or established under colonial imperatives, New Zealand is now
under an obligation to answer to the international community concern-
ing the welfare and status of its indigenous people (Kingsbury, 1989).
Many New Zealanders, especially non-Ma\ori, do not appreciate this fact
nor the deleterious effect that the lack of an adequate resource base has
had on Ma\ori progress over the past century and a half. Particularly vocal
are those who uphold the notion that “we are all New Zealanders, and
this is a democratic country” and who remain unswayed by arguments
concerning the common justice of the course taken by (and indeed the
moral responsibility of ) recent governments in attempting to redress the
legislative wrongs of the past.
In a climate of increasingly vocal though largely uninformed criti-
cism of the tribunal process, and of the scale and settlement of Ma\ori
claims, the need is clear for a greater understanding by non-Ma\ori of the
relationship between Ma\ori and the land. This relationship does not
depend upon Ma\ori “ownership” as such, for it is inconceivable according
to traditional thinking that Ma\ori should own Papa-tu\-a\-nuku, their
earth mother. Rather, it is she who owns them, through having nurtured
them from their East Polynesian origins to their later “becoming” as
Ma\ori, in tribal regions with landmarks and foods characteristic of that
place and its geographic and climatic conditions. Ownership, or more
appropriately land tenure was confirmed by a process of settlement and
cultivation, in which the concept of ‘ahi kaa,’ the “lit fires” of continuous
occupation, sent an unmistakable message to others that prior occupation
rights would be strenuously protected.
In the early stages of European occupation of New Zealand, land
transactions that were perceived as sales by would-be purchasers were
more in the nature of usage rights, such as Ma\ori themselves practiced.
Land was communally held, and while tracts of land might be made avail-
able to outsiders for specific purposes, the expectation was that this land
would revert to the tribal group once it was no longer needed for that pur-
pose. Initially at least, then, alienation of land was inconceivable. It was
only later that permanent loss became a reality that had to be coped with
by mental and emotional adjustments, in the ongoing process of adapt-
ing to colonial ways.
Today, ancestral Ma\ori land is most simply defined as land that
belonged to Ma\ori ancestors. That is, this land—held at one time in com-
munal, native, or aboriginal title—refers to all the land in New Zealand,
whether Ma\ori themselves hold individual title at the present time. Such
an association of Ma\ori and the land could be seen as a stereotype, but it
is also a statement of a perceived significant difference between Ma\ori and
Pa\keha\, in which the former seek to establish a moral connection to places
that the latter now hold through Crown processes.
The task of determining whether Ma\ori assertions of links to the
land are sincere and genuine, or whether they are ideologically driven, was
a challenge I felt motivated to act upon; although, in all fairness, my con-
cern was also prompted by an apparently opportunistic trend in some
Ma\ori claims that lent a heavy emphasis to spiritual links to the land. To
218 AILSA L. SMITH
the outward appearance this type of claim gave the impression of a politi-
cization of views held by largely urbanized Ma\ori, many of whom are now
divorced from their tribal roots.
How could I, then, as an indigenous woman, reconcile these differ-
ing perceptions with my awareness of the colonial process and the despo-
liation of Ma\ori taonga (treasures) over the generations? My challenge
thus became one of identifying a credible source of data—from Ma\ori
sources—that would demonstrate conclusively how Ma\ori regarded the
land in former times, in order to appeal persuasively to the reason that lies
beneath an often unprepossessing exterior of cultural intolerance in this
country.
The data source I chose to work with was a collection of some
eighty Ma\ori waiata tangi (laments) in manuscript form, recorded in the
late nineteenth century by my tupuna (great-grandfather), Te Kahui
Kararehe of Taranaki. The appropriateness of using these songs as my
source documents lay in their recognized value as carriers of tribal infor-
mation, since their formal structure and slight rhythm provided
mnemonic aid in recalling knowledge and transmitting it unchanged over
many generations. I therefore felt they could be probed for information
on Ma\ori feelings for place that was as authentic, if not more so, than any
other source available today.
I had worked with these songs previously, but more as an exercise in
individual interpretation than in an effort to understand their overall
nature and content. Using them as working texts for my doctoral thesis
(Smith 2001), I had to search for them throughout my tupuna’s writings
and then transcribe, edit, translate, and interpret them. So began a per-
sonal journey of discovery into the minds of my Taranaki people as I
sought for genuine insights into the role of “place” in their lives, by ana-
lyzing the particular genre of oral literature they had left behind.
STUDY BACKGROUND
The songs I researched were replete with personal and place names: of
tribal boundaries; genealogical lines of descent and ancestors both female
and male; cultivations and mahinga kai (food gathering areas); wa\hi tapu
(sacred sites) such as ancient battlegrounds and burial places; and more.
Many place names were descriptive because Ma\ori meant them to be
informative: of food supplies and other resources, the physical terrain,
environmental sounds, and ancestral exploits. In particular, place names
give an insight into the history of the tribal group, since that history is
called to mind in the recital of those names. One aspect of the significance
of place, therefore, is its connectedness with ancestral events that occurred
at definite locations within the tribal territory so that an awareness of the
geographic location of a place is not complete without an accompanying
awareness of the emotional significance of that place to the tribal group
through ancestral associations over time. A word that refers to this inter-
connectedness of time and place is wa\, the circumstance of an event,
which binds people and place together in a space that is both relative and
ongoing.
Particularly noticeable in the song texts I studied was an all-pervad-
ing sense of place, an aspect I felt should appeal to western minds because
of its emphasis upon the “seen” components of the landscape. Although I
could have focused upon more esoteric elements in the waiata, an empha-
sis upon descriptive aspects would, I felt, encourage readers to think
imaginatively, while at the same time it recognizes the preference of
Ma\ori, like other oral peoples, to communicate in words and phrases with
visual and perceptual appeal.
The approach I decided upon was to isolate threads of imagery from
the waiata and group them for analysis, my aim being to highlight a pre-
occupation with the environment of individuals and groups who were
facing a crisis associated with death or other adversity. At such times one
might expect that only those aspects of enduring significance would find
a place in the compositions that resulted from such engagements with
reality. Since the landscape element is a recurring theme in many waiata
tangi, it can be readily seen that the landscape (or “place”) occupied a
prominent position in the minds of the composers and their audiences.
In this chapter I use the terms place, land, and landscape inter-
changeably. From a Ma\ori perspective, places were discrete pieces of land
that held special significance by virtue of an ancestral event that happened
there: the birthplace of a chief, a taumata or high point where a traveler
might rest and survey the surrounding countryside, the site of an ancient
pa\ or stronghold. Where a number of such places occurred in close prox-
imity, as might be expected over an extended period of occupation in a
particular area, those places effectively combined to become—or were the
building blocks that made up—land.
Land as a recognized tribal area served a utilitarian purpose as the
place from which the community drew its sustenance. The word for land
(whenua) refers also to the afterbirth of a newborn child, since the land
was personified as Papa-tu\-a\-nuku the earth mother, the source of all life.
220 AILSA L. SMITH
In this sense land, as the natural provider of the community’s needs, was
more than just a portion of the earth’s surface but possessed an emotional
significance that transcended geographic boundaries.
Landscape was the land viewed self-consciously because of the
altered emphasis placed upon it in the new, settler-dominated society. In
the climate of heightened cultural awareness that Ma\ori experienced dur-
ing the nineteenth century, land came to be viewed more as an object than
a subject of regard, with an increasing emphasis upon its economic value
and less upon its former roles as the provider of food and, through place
names, an oral record of tribal histories. Nevertheless, Ma\ori writers today
use the term landscape to refer to everything associated with the land in its
ancestral, cultural, and natural aspects; the key to understanding such ref-
erences is an awareness of the role of whakapapa or genealogical lines of
descent as a crucial component of individual and group identity. Thus
what an outsider might regard as an empty recital of landscape features and
names masks a deeper and more elemental awareness of the connectedness
of people to “this” landscape through time, which stretches back beyond
mortal and godlike ancestors to the earliest ages of the world.
Today, Ma\ori introduce themselves to each other on formal occa-
sions by giving their connections to their iwi (tribe) and hapu\ (subtribe),
to significant ancestors, and to outstanding landmarks in the tribal terri-
tory, such as a mountain, river, or lake. These group-specific ancestral and
territorial markers establish a referential framework to which others can
relate and tie the people of that group to a particular geographic area in a
tapestry of indissoluble family and community linkages.
The settings in which those formal occasions take place can be a
tribal or urban marae, a kura or whare wa\nanga (secondary or tertiary
learning institution), or a ko\hanga reo (infants’ “language nest”), where
instruction in cultural values is given in the Ma\ori language, an official lan-
guage of New Zealand since 1987. Whatever the setting, the outcome is
the inculcation of pride in “being Ma\ori,” a significant component of
which is an awareness of and association with one’s ancestral homelands.
The catalyst for such an awareness today derives most significantly from a
mood of growing Ma\ori assertiveness in the 1980s, when the Waitangi Tri-
bunal’s powers were extended retrospectively to 1840 to allow the Crown
to address breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi from that date forward.
I turn now to a discussion of waiata tangi and the way in which they
capture the essence of Ma\ori feelings for “their place” in the landscape,
which they once occupied with confidence in their right to belong in such
settings.
THE NATURE OF WAIATA TANGI
Waiata tangi contain a wealth of classical, local, and historical references,

expressed in some of the most beautiful examples of the language. Con-
sisting of sometimes as many as sixty lines, these songs of lamentation are
complex, with their often densely packed imagery drawn from mythol-
ogy, legend and folklore, ancestral and archetypal precedents, kinship
relationships, and personalities. The range of landscape imagery covered
in the texts I studied included references to lightning; mountains and
other high points of land; the stars and moon; forests and trees; the ocean
and tides; land and sea birds; winds and clouds; rivers and lakes, paths and
beaches; the sun, seasons, smoke and mists; the built environment; vege-
tation (medicinal and scented herbs, famine foods); fish and fishing; and
metaphysical references to the pantheon of Ma\ori gods. Although neither
prescriptive nor exhaustive, this list gives an indication of the all-encom-
passing nature of Ma\ori perceptions of their world and of their situated-
ness within it.
As might be expected from the name, waiata tangi were inspired by
misfortune or disaster and performed a necessary function in helping the
bereaved or bereft adjust to circumstances beyond their control. Further,
in providing a means of publicly expressing feelings of distress and grief,
waiata tangi drew the tribal group together in an affirmation of mutual-
ity and support.
Many laments refer in their opening lines to some aspect of the nat-
ural world, to which the composer’s attention was drawn in a creative
moment. This could be a configuration of stars, the sun’s rays lighting up
the morning sky, fog drifting down over the horizon, or the long hours of
darkness during which the composer lay awake and reflective. Settings
such as these invoked the mood of introspection needed for the waiata to
be presented appropriately and for the audience to appreciate it. That such
settings relate to the natural landscape is indicative of the importance of
the environment in the lives and consciousness of the Ma\ori people.
A question that might be asked, nevertheless, is whether Ma\ori saw the
land in terms of its picturesque or scenic qualities, as well as its more com-
plex cultural connections. From a study of trends in waiata composition it
becomes apparent that older waiata contained many metaphysical and
archaic references, which could only be understood by the application of spe-
cialist knowledge gained in traditional schools of learning. Following colo-
nization and the loss of tribal lands, naming became more overt, deliberate,
and conscious, with an increasing incorporation of descriptive elements into
222 AILSA L. SMITH
the wording of song texts so that those who lacked that earlier specialized
knowledge could share in the mood of the occasion.
Two examples, referring to the movement of birds in the landscape,
illustrate the descriptive aspect of waiata tangi. The first uses the term
ripeka (cross), to refer to the way in which long-legged wading birds run
“cross-legged” over the sand. The second employs the word kopa (folded,
like a wallet or satchel with a flap lid), to describe a young bird gaining
height with downwardly thrusting wings so that it appears to “fold” and
“unfold” in flight. Examples like these illustrate the profound sense that
Ma\ori had of their environment, which they encapsulated in words with
the power to impart that sense to others. Today, such novel and distinc-
tively different ways of looking at the environment convey a sense of
delight and appreciation of the minds that could conceive of such aptness
and vividness in the crafting of this mode of expression.
Waiata were in fact composed by borrowing formulaic phrases from
existing waiata and reassembling them to fit new or changed circum-
stances; giving rise to new songs in their own right. Although this process
suggests a mechanistic approach to composition (and was regarded euro-
centrically as plagiarism), waiata were as finely crafted as the skill of their
composers could make them, with originality and creativity as ultimate
goals. Any suggestion, therefore, that a composer’s “way with words” was
compromised by reusing elements from other waiata is readily countered
by considering reasons for waiata composition: to sway audiences by their
persuasive power, to impress with their ability to evoke images that were
apt and telling, to draw communities together in times of crisis, and to
perpetuate the deeds of ancestral figures whose successes had secured the
land and its resources for their descendants.
Another question that might be asked is whether a gendered
approach is evident in the subject matter and tone of waiata tangi—
whether heroic or homely, vengeful or reflective, or some other mood that
fits the overall purpose of these songs. Although the identity of the com-
posers could not be ascertained in some twenty percent of the songs I
studied, male composers appeared to outnumber their female counter-
parts by three to one. This is not to say that the composition of waiata
tangi was predominantly a male province, for women could express them-
selves as forcefully or plaintively in this type of waiata as in other kinds
with which they were more traditionally associated, such as waiata aroha,
waiata whakautu, kaioraora, and apakura.
Waiata aroha or love laments were mostly composed by women but
could be modified by men to express deep emotions other than the more
commonly encountered themes of unsatisfied or unrequited love. Associ-

ated too with the theme of love, waiata whakautu or songs of reply were
composed by women who had become the subject of ill-natured gossip.
In Ma\ori society words were often the only medium through which a
woman could assert herself, and a skillfully worded composition did
much to restore her reputation in the eyes of the community (Orbell,
1978, 12). These songs often named places in the tribal territory, but
more to emphasize the composer’s own standing than, as in waiata tangi,
to recount themes of relevance to the deceased.
A virulent form of waiata, kaioraora (cursing songs) could be
resorted to by a woman whose husband had been killed in battle
(although, atypically, the few I studied from Taranaki were written by
men). Kaioraora were not, properly speaking, laments but were closely
associated with such songs because of their common focus on death.
Apakura served a similar function to kaioraora but took the form of an
exaggerated lament intended to arouse the composer’s community to
avenge the death of a close male relative. The weeping of the archetypal
figure Apakura, who gave her name to this kind of composition, was
likened to—or could be heard in—the sound of the waves (White 1887,
149), a connection of particular significance in Taranaki because of its
geographic location in a predominantly coastal setting.
Although waiata were characteristically built up from formulaic
phrases and the dismantling of other waiata, women were equally capa-
ble of innovation in composition. Different again from the focus of the
song types discussed above, a lament by a woman for her dead son retains
the structure and poetic conventions of a waiata tangi, while including
themes drawn from missionary teachings. A consideration of certain lines
illustrates the effortless way in which she blends traditional and transi-
tional elements in a poignant appeal to the Christian God, whose name
in some cosmologies is that of the supreme being of the Ma\ori pantheon.
Those lines read, in translation: “God in Heaven, look down then on my
greenstone treasure/Hiding below here in your shelter.”
To Ma\ori, greenstone or jade was as precious as is gold to western
minds, and this honorific reference is highly symbolic. Nevertheless, the
further reference to “hiding . . . in your shelter” is a Christian image, not
a Ma\ori one, and places this waiata at the cusp of those that could be
investigated for traditional feelings for place.
A transitional element with more calculated intent is found in a
waiata composed by the woman poet Hurungarangi, in which she urges
her people to “stand for New Zealand, and gain the victory.” Here, the
224 AILSA L. SMITH
reference to New Zealand is an unusual one but can be understood if it is

realized that Ma\ori were referred to as “New Zealanders,” throughout
most of the nineteenth century, by the predominantly European-born set-
tler population. In applying this concept to her people and legitimating
them as the rightful occupiers of the soil, Hurungarangi robs their tribal
foes of this distinction. More important, and by implication, she denies it
to the settlers as well.
Another unusual feature suggested by Hurungarangi’s choice of
phrase is that, although such concepts might be borrowed from the colo-
nial presence, that presence was rarely if ever acknowledged in songs that
resulted from confrontations with Imperial (and later colonial) forces dur-
ing the land wars. The ultimate enemy was death and separation from the
land and the living. Thus the significance of those themes the waiata do
mention, as well as those they do not, becomes all the more compelling.
An example comes from a lament composed after the battle of Te
Morere (Sentry Hill) in 1864, when the followers of the religious leader
Te Ua Haumene were defeated by British troops. The waiata begins with
a reference to the play of lightning out at sea and around the peak of the
tribal mountain and to the configuration of stars that denoted death and
disaster. Those who died in the fighting, among them the sons of the
southern Taranaki composer, Tamati Hone Oraukawa, were addressed in
honorific terms and associated with distinctive landmarks in the tribal ter-
ritory. No mention was made of the troops whose bullets had brought
them down to lie, as another phrase puts it, like canoes that had been
whirled about by eddying currents.
After the engagement at Te Morere, women came onto the battle-
field to search for their kin, to help the wounded, and to weep over the
dead. Women are the classic mourners in any society, but men, too, could
contemplate the loss of a child or a staunch friend in terms that were, for
the characteristically warlike Ma\ori race, uncharacteristically tender and
reflective. So the aged Makere of northern Taranaki, who had lost a
grandson, could call for assistance “to take me to the headland at
Okawa/To feel for and grasp the heart of the land.” (But how do I,
removed in space and time and “othered” by gender and changes in cul-
tural upbringing, explain “the heart of the land” and the unutterable sense
of loss that calls forth a phrase such as this?)
So, too, my tupuna Te Kahui could say of his two sons who had died
in childhood: “Maku e tangi kau nga wai e rere/He wai tukunga kiri no
te ipo ma ra e” (I weep beside the flowing waters/The place where my
loved ones jumped and swam).
The phrase tukunga kiri refers to the way in which Ma\ori children
jumped feet first into the water, an image that is profoundly reminiscent
of carefree childhood. So too are these lines that he composed for his
daughter, who also died in childhood: “Then perhaps you are in your
river, little one/Dipping in and out of the water.” Here, though, the
phrase “your river” is no fond irrelevance. Rather, its significance lies in
the Ma\ori practice of naming places to assert ownership, in just such a
fashion as Ma\ori today, by virtue of their tu\rangawaewae status, stand on
the marae and deliver a whakataukê or whaiko\rero that names tribal
boundaries and other significant landmarks. This “right to name” was
implicit in the composition of waiata tangi for, as a female member of Te
Kahui’s family wrote in one of his manuscripts, “no Maori would com-
pose a song or lament for any place unless they had a full right to it. This
is a custom of the Maori people.”
I give the term heroic to songs of this nature, to waiata tangi and the
allied song types referred to above, since in composing and performing
these songs the composers were placed in larger than life situations, which
were played out in front of immediate and discerning audiences. Although
many songs begin on a somber note, in keeping with their prevailing
theme, they finish strongly and assertively. They therefore deserve the title
of heroic since they exemplify the unquenchability of the human spirit.
So a woman might express resignation in the face of loss by con-
cluding with these words:
Sitting here in the days of summer,
A host of cicadas throbs about me,
And birdsong resounds,
And people pass away into nothingness.
(But, again, how am I to understand and then interpret, across the

boundaries of space and time, the desolation of resignation arising out of
a contemplation of “nothingness”? More, how can I articulate the sense of
what is meant, so that others may grasp it?)
In the closing lines of another waiata, composed by Te Kahui for Te
Whetu, the “fighting general” of Taranaki during the land wars, a succession
of word pictures evokes the similarly philosophical nature of his conclusions:
Now Tamanui-te-ra shines his rays upon the land;
The land dries up, the sea dries up,
The lizard stretches out and basks in the heat.
Come then, my friend. Your older brothers
226 AILSA L. SMITH
Will heap up clouds after you . . .

What is life’s essence, that it can be withdrawn?
What is life’s essence, that it can be overcome?
It cannot be overcome, it is a post of Tangaroa that stands!
In this waiata the setting is the heat of summer, while the cumulus clouds
are rising to great heights and, in this context, giving the best possible
conditions for the soul’s onward flight. The “post of Tangaroa,” which can
only be understood with reference to the cosmology of the Taranaki
region, is an enduring symbol of the Ma\ori will to survive.
In summarizing this discussion of gendered approaches in waiata
tangi it becomes evident that content and tone range from softer themes
enunciating a sense of loss, such as a woman might articulate—memories
of children or a beloved spouse, and the intimacies of family life—to
grander, more epic themes of death and survival and those that eulogize a
figure of tribal importance.
I turn now to a consideration of Ma\ori cosmologies, the most
widely known being that given to Governor Sir George Grey in the nine-
teenth century by Te Rangikaheke, a Te Arawa (central North Island)
leader. I also discuss a little-known version from Taranaki, in order to
demonstrate the spirituality that links Taranaki Ma\ori with their environ-
ment and their past.
MA|ORI COSMOLOGIES
Ma\ori feelings for their place in the landscape are premised upon an aware-
ness of the sky above them and the ground beneath their feet as two per-
sonalized beings, Ranginui-e-tu\-nei (Rangi) and Papa-tu\-a\-nuku (Papa), the
sky father and earth mother. Between these primal parents as they lay
together in space, as yet unseparated, dwelt a number of sons whose func-
tion was to oversee the welfare of various spheres of natural activity upon the
earth. Deprived of light and space in which to grow, the sons of Rangi and
Papa debated how, and indeed whether, they should thrust their parents
apart. In the Te Arawa version given to Sir George Grey, the initiative was
taken and the action performed by Ta\ne, presiding deity of forests and trees.
If one considers the prevailing vegetation of the Te Arawa region,
with its forest cover of tall trees, it is obvious that Ta\ne’s trees do, indeed,
hold Rangi aloft in his present position. And yet, in another part of the
country with a different set of geographic features, what might the result
of the debate have been?
In Taranaki, I found an isolated account in manuscript form of the

story of Rangi and Papa, which names Tangaroa, presiding deity of seas
and fish, as the son who separated the primal parents. The significance of
this version is that it is entirely consistent with the local landscape for, if
one stands to the west of Mount Taranaki and faces seaward, it becomes
evident that the sea, Tangaroa, effects the separation of his parents by
pushing the sky out to the horizon. This emphasis on the sea is a prevail-
ing theme in Taranaki waiata tangi since that region, surrounding the
soaring volcanic cone from which both region and tribes take their name,
is bounded on three sides by the sea.
Standing with one’s back to the mountain one also faces toward
Hawaiki, the mythical homeland of the Ma\ori people, to which the spir-
its of the dead returned on the outgoing tide. Such a tide off the Taranaki
coast is referred to in waiata tangi as “he tai mihinga tangata” (a people-
greeting tide), while a tide devoid of spiritual freight is “he tai tangata
kore” (a tide without people). A third aspect of gazing out to sea from the
slopes of the mountain is that one looks out over the most fertile acres of
this region, where a concentration of sacred sites (carved rocks, former pa\
sites, named cultivations), as well as access to the rich food resources of
the coast, is locked up in land confiscated by the Crown in the 1860s and
largely given over to Pa\keha\ settlement.
As a result of the separation of Rangi and Papa a number of opposi-
tions came into play. These legitimated the use by humans of their environ-
mental kin as food and explained the conflicting forces of nature: the tem-
pestuous battering of trees by the wind, the assertive nature of humans in
their fight against the elements, and the ceaseless interplay of sea and land
along the coastlines. This latter aspect is particularly noticeable along the
southern Taranaki coast, where crumbling cliffs testify to Tangaroa’s preem-
inence. A phrase in a waiata tangi emphasizes this preeminence by telling the
dead person not to “stay in the forest of Ta\ne/But listen to the tides crying
beyond Heiawe” (a place in a coastal setting associated with the deceased).
The “post of Tangaroa” referred to earlier almost certainly comes
from the perception that anything associated with Tangaroa—a post sig-
nifies steadfastness or immovability—cannot be overcome by external
forces but endures forever. This phrase therefore represents the unwaver-
ing determination of the Ma\ori people to withstand moves by the colo-
nial government to deprive them of their ancestral lands, and hence their
history, their livelihood, and their identity.
The Taranaki account is silent regarding a further stage in the cos-
mological saga, in which Ta\ne sought for the female principle in order
228 AILSA L. SMITH
to establish human life upon the earth. According to the Te Arawa ver-
sion he finally achieved this after bringing into being all other created
forms, such as rocks, water, trees, birds, insects, and reptiles. He thus
became the common parent of all and the being through whom Ma\ori
claim a spiritually enhanced relationship with the environment in all its
manifestations.
SUMMARY
An indigenous people who place great store upon intergenerational links

with ancestral lands, the Ma\ori people of Aotearoa/New Zealand tradi-
tionally expressed those links in mythopoetic imagery in whakataukê
(proverbs), whaiko\rero (oratory) and waiata (songs). In particular, the
classical song type known as waiata tangi exhibits a strong sense of place
component, based on an intimate acquaintance with tribal lands over
centuries of occupation in specific areas.
The overwhelming evidence from an examination of Ma\ori feel-
ings for place, as exemplified in Taranaki waiata tangi, is that the rela-
tionship between people and the land has its roots in the enduring
nature and distinctiveness of Ma\ori worldviews. Bonds forged over gen-
erations of interaction in the tribal territory resulted in iwi-specific ways
of accounting for the landforms of that territory, according to its par-
ticular characteristics. This led to the formulation of cosmological
beliefs that were framed in the light of a holistic conceptualization of
kinship bonds. These beliefs were transmitted intergenerationally
through the evocative power of the spoken word and through the visu-
alization it necessarily engendered. Interwoven with the substance of
those beliefs were the value systems of the Ma\ori people, which inter-
penetrated every aspect of their relationship with the natural environ-
ment. At all times there was a reinforcing of the fundamental concepts
that underpinned Ma\ori society and led to its enduring nature in tribal
form. Thus meanings that adhere to the land may not lightly be
changed without threatening the identity of the individual and the exis-
tence of the tribal group that forms part of that identity. An awareness
of this fact will go a long way toward explaining why Taranaki Ma\ori
fought to retain their tu\rangawaewae or foothold in the nineteenth cen-
tury and why unaddressed Ma\ori land claims remain today as a burden
upon the conscience of the nation.
CONCLUSION
What then is my sense, as an indigenous woman, of the sense of place of

my ancestors in the tribal landscape? Having concluded this study, I am
convinced of the existence of a deeply spiritual link between Ma\ori and
the land, based as much upon the latter as the natural provider of our
needs in former times as upon the creation accounts that give a graphi-
cally compelling account of the interrelatedness of life in its myriad
forms. Through primary socialization within the family or tribal commu-
nity, and secondary socialization in centers of learning where Ma\ori cul-
tural values are imparted and instilled, these accounts serve to remind us
of our identity in relation to the places that granted us, through our
ancestors, existence. There can be no stronger link to the land than this.
11
Theater Near Us
Librarians, Culture, and Space

in the Harlem Renaissance
Katherine Wilson
In the later years of the Harlem Renaissance, two successive theater

groups rehearsed and produced their shows in the basement of a branch
of the New York Public Library on 135th Street. Both groups were delib-
erately modeled on the Little Theater (or Art Theater) movement, origi-
nally a white, early twentieth-century project, defined as distinct from the
commercial theater forms much more prevalent at the time. Regina M.
Anderson Andrews (1901–1993), a Harlem librarian who was also
involved in this new kind of theater, lightly satirized the typical enter-
tainments in her play, The Man Who Passed. In this work, the character
Kid boasts of his plans to hop from social club, to light theater spectacle
(the Lafayette), a dance, and a party: “dere’s de Gran’ Ball given by the
‘Inspired Cousins of Georgia,’ at de Manhattan—a midnight show Tues-
day at de Lafayette, to be followed by a breakfas’ dance at Susie’s to say
nothing of a little private affair some of de boys is pullin’ off for some high
yaller visitin’ ladies” (Andrews 1996, 46). In contrast to this flurry of light
fun, Little Theater in African American communities was a deliberate,
theorized experiment to bring serious entertainment into their own
neighborhoods; it was cultivated by the educated and professional elite,
integrated in schools (especially Howard University in Washington,
D.C.), and promoted by the major newspapers, Crisis and Opportunity,
which sponsored play-writing contests, published winning plays, and
printed essays that argued over the aesthetic controversies of what Negro
drama should be. The influential voices in these debates were those of the
“New Negro” movement’s powerful visionaries, who were men—W. E. B.
Du Bois, who promoted the “propaganda” play, and Alain Locke, who
231
232 KATHERINE WILSON
argued for “folk” entertainment—and women who played a central role

in their activities as producers of these theater projects. Yet the women’s
works and writings have been overshadowed by the well-publicized dis-
courses of their male counterparts.
In an era when serious high-brow theater was only white and staged
only downtown, when Negro roles were restricted to minstrel stereotypes
(as even black performers corked their faces), Du Bois articulated the mis-
sion to produce artistic, uplifting theater that was “(1) a theater about us,
(2) a theater by us, (3) a theater for us, and (4) a theater near us,” a vision
that linked what the play was about, who wrote it, who saw it, and—what
is more rare to twentieth-century art manifestos—where it happened (Du
Bois paraphrased in Andrews 1975, 70). Regina Anderson later recalled
that even when there were downtown revues featuring blacks, “few were
presented in Harlem where the black playwright’s audience lived” (1975,
69). Thus, this concern for artistic self-representation was entwined with
the issue of geography—that is, of space.
The first theater group to establish a home in the local library was
affiliated with Du Bois’ periodical The Crisis. It was organized by him
with others, including women, notably playwright Eulalie Spence (who
did not wholly subscribe to Du Bois’ aesthetic policy) and Regina
Andrews. Called the “Krigwa Players” (an acronym adapted from “Crisis
Guild of Writers and Artists”), it lasted only a year from 1926 to 1927.
From Krigwa’s ashes arose the Negro Experimental Theater, later the
Harlem Experimental Theater, or HET (c. 1928–1935), the second the-
ater to occupy the library basement; this incarnation arose without Du
Bois but nonetheless was still largely consistent with his aesthetic credo.
While Krigwa and HET did stage plays by white playwrights both
new and old, the groups were determined to stage humble productions of
new, serious one-acts by black playwrights, plays that promoted positive
and presumably realistic reflections of Negro experience. The project
aimed to develop theater talents among African Americans, particularly
playwrights, to bring serious drama to the neighborhood, and to stage
characterizations that were more accurate and positive. Usually they
grouped three short plays a night, charging a modest price in order to pay
the writers, who had often placed in the playwriting contest at the Crisis.
To work where they lived, a noncommercial black theater project had to
contend with the squeezed overcrowding and inflated rents of Harlem—
where landlords were by and large not black—while operating on a shoe-
string budget (on conditions in Harlem, see Drake and Cayton 1993,
Kusmer 1986, and Ottley and Weatherby 1967). It was the library space
Theater Near Us 233
that allowed the theater to happen without compromising its principles—

the library let the theater happen “near us.”
As a sociopolitical-cultural movement, the Harlem Renaissance
grew from deliberate cultivation, arrangement, and negotiation—not
from spontaneous combustion or a natural coincidence of genius. As with
all social transformation, the Harlem Renaissance involved the transfor-
mation not only of ideas but also of space—I do not use the word in its
metaphorical senses (as in “spaces of the imagination”) but in its literal
sense: streets, homes, stores, churches, and basements were literally
changed in the course of this revival. This modification of municipal
space for cultural production by African Americans is the subject of this
chapter, which was based on archival research in the papers of librarian
and theater artist Regina Andrews, whose files are housed in the collec-
tion she herself helped to build—the New York Public Library Schom-
burg Center. Recent theories about the social shaping of space inform this
reading of the past, as they bring space up from the taken-for-granted
background and outline categories with which to consider how space is
used in each particular social configuration (social practice), how it is rep-
resented in cultural images (blueprints, or in this case, drama), how peo-
ple shape space for cultural and social events, and how gender affects all
those dimensions (see Sharp 1999, 257–59). An attention to space helps
in consideration of a question that springs from the story of Krigwa and
HET: how is it that Negro theater came to occupy the basement of the
public library, an extension of a practically (if not legally) segregated and
white-dominated city? The convergence of marginal black art and munic-
ipal space was contingent on multiple developments, each of which will
be elaborated in turn: (1) the transformation of Harlem’s demography (by
1920 it had flipped from a mainly Jewish suburb to a black-populated
urban concentration, black populated but almost nowhere black owned);
(2) the ethos of the public library, an institution and ideology, which then
was a fairly recent development; and (3) the conscientious agency, or
praxis, of key figures among Harlem’s privileged class, most prominently
men, but importantly also a sizable proportion of women (on the latter,
see Brown-Guillory 1988, Perkins and Stephens 1998).
REGINA ANDREWS
At the intersection of these dimensions (Harlem, the library, and theater)

was the librarian Regina M. Anderson Andrews (1901–1992). A mixed-
race, well-educated Chicago native, Andrews ensconced herself as one of

the so-called Talented Tenth, the more privileged and influential stratum
of Negro New Yorkers who maneuvered the circulation of African Amer-
ican culture in—and for—Harlem. Though not yet the subject of a full-
length biography, Andrews’ life and works are mentioned briefly across
numerous studies and reference texts related to African Americans gener-
ally or the Harlem Renaissance in particular (see for example Brown
1992, Jefferson 1993, Mitchell 1975, Roses and Randolph 1990). At suc-
cessive phases of her career, Andrews, in different ways, acted on culture
through space. Before her marriage, with her women roommates, twenty-
something Regina Anderson hosted what we may call a “salon” in their
home on Sugar Hill. The gatherings became known in shorthand by the
house number, “580.” This salon, like Georgia Douglass’ equally famous
“S-Street” salon in Washington, D.C., functioned as an informal cultural
center, facilitating the circulation of ideas and strengthening social net-
works. In salons hostesses transformed a private, domestic, feminine
sphere into a cultural forum; they changed the shape of the social space
in a way that made them central agents in the circulation of a culture oth-
erwise largely public and masculine; they also invented a black cultural
venue when established cultural venues were elsewhere and white.
This maneuvering of space continued as Andrews, while a clerk in
the 135th Street library, helped broker the use of its basement for the-
ater—a process explained below—as well as arranged exhibits for young
visual artists she met at the “580” soirees. After World War II, with more
authority as head librarian of another branch located just south of
Harlem, she welcomed the next generation of theater artists to that library
basement, as theater artist Lofton Mitchell recalled fondly in his narrative
of the era (Mitchell 1975, 71). Within the library system, Andrews also
orchestrated other nontheatrical cultural events—youth discussions and
“family nights” centered on topics—varied projects that served compati-
ble and similar purposes, as elaborated below.
Besides arranging the theater’s use of the space, Andrews herself
belonged to the earlier theater groups, Krigwa and HET: she served on
their boards, performed in productions, and wrote three plays, at least
two of which were staged by HET (though outside the 135th Street
library). Her plays—spare, moral, and realist one-act dramas—are not set
in the domestic feminine sphere, which was common, or almost manda-
tory, for women writers of any race at the time. Andrews set each of her
plays in a quasipublic interior—an underground railway station (Under-
ground), a Southern Baptist church (Climbing Jacob’s Ladder), and a black-
owned Harlem barbershop (The Man Who Passed). Together, the plays
touch on key tropes in African American experience and imagination—
oppression by white society, Christianity, lynching, Harlem, hair, and pass-
ing. Underground (the script occasionally misidentified as Mathilde and
written under the pseudonym Ursala Trelling) is set in a “station” of the
underground railroad; it is less a place to congregate than one to pass
through, a refuge en route to freedom in the North. Though the opening
pages are missing, the remainder of the manuscript makes clear the crux of
the plot: a slave family eludes the bounty hunters when the daughter dis-
guises herself as a white belle, one whom the goons chivalrously admired.
The heroine Mathilde’s maneuver highlights the double entwined sense of
“passing,” as a racial disguise, on the one hand, that allows freer movement
across restrictive social boundaries; on the other, passing as white, the
young woman can pass from slave-holding South into the North. Climb-
ing Jacob’s Ladder: A Tragedy of Negro Life can be categorized as a “lynch
play,” a subgenre label used to group the dramas, usually by women, in
which lynching was key to the plot (see Perkins and Stephens 1998).
While most lynch plays are set in a home, Andrews set hers in a Southern
Baptist church. At an interchurch meeting, the congregation, distracted by
their mistrust over money, fails to rescue their member who has been
arrested and then lynched; when they start to act, they are petrified by fear
of lightening. In this plot, in contrast to Andrews’ usual civic ideal, the
gathering in one place actually fails to improve social circumstances; just
having a room to meet in, the play suggests, is not enough without partic-
ipants’ willingness to cooperate and unify.
The Man Who Passed was Andrews’ only play based in Harlem. She
wrote it under a male pseudonym, adopted from her Jewish maternal
grandfather, Henry Simmons, though some male chroniclers attribute her
election of pen names to feminine modesty (e.g., Brown 1992, 20). As in
Underground, the main character, Fred, also passes in both racial and spa-
tial senses, though Andrews constructs his choice to cause his own alien-
ation, not freedom. Fred has forsaken the Negro world to live as white
among whites downtown but must return to Harlem to the one barber
who can set his hair the right way—to look white. Ironically it is precisely
a place within the despised neighborhood, the barbershop, that enables
him to “pass” the boundaries of segregation into the downtown white dis-
tricts. Andrews’ 1920s barbershop functions as a kind of masculine com-
munity center, where men circulate and banter among one another, as the
character Kid comes for the haircut fashionable enough for the busy social
life he boasts about in the quotation above. When a client in the shop
entertains the men by reading a newspaper aloud, Fred learns that his par-
ents have died. The tragic mulatto figure of the play, a male version of the
more typical mulatta, has abandoned the black spaces, and in so doing,
severed his ties with community and family—the social dimension of his
experience, in other words, is embedded in space.
Andrews’ representations of space favored public venues—
church, underground railway, and barbershop—a preference indicative
of her civic values. Beyond her representation of space, she seems to
have worked to affect actual cultural space and did so in ways that can
be considered in terms of gender. A recurrent theme made evident by
Andrews’ collected papers, read through the lens of recent space and
gender theory in social sciences (as articulated by Doreen Massey and
Shirley Ardner, among others), is that Andrews extended the identity
of a certain feminized space in order to facilitate what can be consid-
ered secular congregations—gatherings for exchange that would foster
community as she saw it. During the Harlem Experimental Theater
years, that community was African Americans in Harlem. Ultimately,
though, Andrews seemed to strive for integration and to express what
might be called “transnationalist” values insofar as she sought commu-
nity not only for African Americans, or American minorities, or the
African diaspora, but across cultures and races. What informed
Andrews’ concerns for specific African American “uplift,” in other
words, was a pluralist ethos of democratic citizenship and a trust in the
promise of what might be called “the public sphere”—a stratum of
social experience between official government and private life (the con-
cept is modified from German philosopher Jürgen Habermas). This
vision of equal civic participation, promoting dialogue, and enriching
social networks requires space in which to gather—a requirement
Andrews clearly recognized. Presenting the inauguration of a library
auditorium, Andrews wrote in her speech, “I know of no community
more in need of a room such as this, a room which offers space for
neighborhood clubs, plays, lectures and classes” (1938, 1). By her own
estimation, under Andrews’ leadership after the late 1940s, the Wash-
ington Heights branch “became a meeting place for people from all
continents” (Andrews 1961, 1).
Andrews’ strategy of congregating used theater as just one means
for the same community-building goal. Though she did act and coordi-
nate and write for theater, what endured across her career was less the
artistic ambition and more the cultural gathering that fostered and
uplifted a community, harnessing the space of public libraries or
Theater Near Us 239
churches to do so. This will to congregate, as elaborated below, both con-

verged and collided with the public-service ethos of the library, the sys-
tem in which she worked.
THE 135th STREET BRANCH

OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
The New York Public Library system had fused only a generation earlier
in the beginning of the twentieth century. Before, the “Harlem Free
Library,” as it was called, had been a subscription service for Harlem’s
then-Jewish community. By 1903 the burgeoning city system swallowed
the Harlem Free Library, turning what had operated as an autonomous
institution for middle-class patrons into one branch within a large, city-
run network that served a poor neighborhood (Dain 1972, 275).
The building, the institution, and the collection each developed
along slightly separate trajectories. The library building was completed
two years after the merger in 1905, funded in the surge of Andrew
Carnegie philanthropy. The architect trio responsible for the branch also
designed the private Morgan Library, the main hall of Columbia Uni-
versity, and the 125th Street branch, constructions that share with the
135th Street library the turn-of-the-century grand and stately style.
Whatever the architects’ intent, though, such styles have no fixed con-
notations; the impression made by the physical design is obviously pro-
duced in conjunction with other cultural associations circulating within
a given community. The building’s appearance might have reinforced the
suggestion that the library was linked to import and power—but none
of the clients’ myriad, glowing recollections of the 135th Street branch
makes even passing mention of its grandiose design. What this suggests
is that how it looked to them registered less than how it was used by
them. (The 135th Street branch building still exists but has been recon-
figured into the annex of the newer building, combining with the Coun-
tee Cullen branch, which sits in the shadow of the larger, more modern
Schomburg Center.)
The New York Public Library as institution, distinct from its build-
ing, coalesced in accord with a model of quantifiable uniformity charac-
teristic of industrialism, operating from its center (Forty-second Street) to
the periphery (branches), as headquarters mandated a uniform catalog
system, inscribed policy, and assigned head librarians to branches (Car-
penter 2001, 376). This was a hierarchy that Andrews would resist several
times in her career. The motivations behind libraries, like other social out-
reach enterprises, involved multiple and perhaps contradictory aspects: to
conserve significant texts, to educate the public, but also to control the
masses, especially as the social body grew increasingly foreign and dark
with the influx of people from Europe and the U.S. South (Bogardus
1993, 2484). Carnegie, the principle funder of this proliferation of edu-
cational institutions, assured skeptics that libraries, by bringing reading to
the working class, would thereby avert revolution (Carpenter 2001, 376).
The urge for social control, though, was paradoxically accompanied by
liberal, democratizing tendencies, tendencies librarians such as Andrews
and her boss extended to almost radical lengths. One of the leading
library apostles, Melvin Dewey (of decimal system fame), inculcated what
proponents called a “library faith”—an admixture of efficiency and civic
zeal—its mission to serve as many people as possible, and to offer them
what they want, without censorship (Roseberry 1970, 67). Dewey prop-
agated his ethos through the graduate programs he founded in “library
Economy” (later called “library science”). His schools trained Andrews’
white boss, Ernestine Rose, and Andrews.
Middle-class white women quickly filled the library schools and the
lower ranks of the libraries. By 1920, the majority (ninety percent) of
librarians were women, a proportion larger than even social workers and
teachers (Garrison 1979, 173); in 1920 the NYPL hired the first black
librarian in the 135th Street branch, Catherine Allen Latimer, who later
became the reference librarian of its Negro Division. Women librarians
are now so common that it is easy to overlook the historical specificity of
this formation. Some feminist historians of space have traced a patriarchal
strategy of separating women from sources of knowledge, whether in
locked chests or in rooms of Victorian houses (Daphne Spain, summa-
rized in Sharp 1999, 259). In the case of the library, though, the space of
knowledge—which easily might have become a prohibitively masculine
citadel—came to be considered a feminine sphere. Why would a public
center of information and knowledge come to be operated by women?
First, it sits within a particular sphere of society: the branch library was
associated with culture, distinct from the sex-segregated arenas of eco-
nomics or politics. Second, it seemed an extension of the (bourgeois)
home: early public library discourse identified librarians literally as “host-
esses” (Garrison 1979, 179). The link of library with home further solid-
ified when branches opened special sections dedicated to children.
At the practical level, from the library’s point of view, middle-class
women were valued not only because they came with broad education
Theater Near Us 241
and multiple languages but also because they brought those advanced
skills at rates much cheaper than those of educated men. Administrative
discourse was rife with explanations of why women were suited to
libraries: women “like literary work” and, as a conference speaker put it
in 1877, “they soften our atmosphere, they lighten our labor, they are
equal to our work, and for the money they cost . . .” (quoted in Garrison
1979, 175). From the working women’s point of view, libraries were wel-
coming, at a time when most other professional careers were still formi-
dably hostile or closed. As one historian noted, then, in filling the library
posts women “merely left the home, not the women’s sphere” (Garrison
1979, 184). If that sphere had a feminine shape, though, librarians such
as Andrews and her white boss could maneuver its contours and bound-
aries into a more unequivocally public form.
Despite the welcome to women generally, Andrews’ own profes-
sional trajectory suggests a limited position within the library for women
who were African American: though Andrews arrived with experience in
library work, according to a note on her curriculum vitae draft, the offi-
cials affixed her to the black neighborhood. In her draft of the resume,
Andrews added a note explaining that after she had lobbied for a merited
raise, it took a letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to influence the director “to
adjust Miss Anderson’s (later Mrs. Andrews) salary to the comparable
level of white professional librarians” (Andrews, c. 1961, 1). It was only
when she relocated to the 115th Street branch in the mid-1940s that she
was able to rise to the position of head librarian—the first African Amer-
ican in New York to reach that level.
THE THEATER IN THE LIBRARY BASEMENT
It is not clear from the piecemeal references to the Harlem Experimental

Theater by what means members arranged to occupy the basement of the
135th Street branch. Andrews, as younger, newer, and black did not wield
direct authority. Rather, she probably negotiated with the white, senior
librarians to open the basement to rehearsals and evening shows for HET.
Library histories laud the white head librarian, Ernestine Rose, for having
integrated the branch with the community. This treatment is understand-
able, given the achievements of the period: the library instituted adult edu-
cation programs, established the city’s first “Negro Division” (which would
become absorbed in the Schomburg collection), hosted annual art
exhibits, and hired a mixed-race staff. The praise of Rose, however, makes
no mention of the theater (which may not have been her focus), and it
obscures the contribution of her African American staff. Regina Andrews,
meanwhile, remembered that her boss allowed basement theater: “Ernes-
tine Rose . . . welcomed the first theater group. I have always been very
glad that I was on Miss Rose’s staff because she gave me a great deal of lat-
itude in planning cooperation with community organizations” (Andrews
in Mitchell 1975, 72). Andrews’ public recollection positions Andrews
herself as the hinge between the community and the library, even as it
acknowledges the white supervisor who made room for that positioning.
From black history narratives, the brief accounts found in definitive
encyclopedias and archive fragments are contradictory and blurred, some
treating Du Bois as prime mover (even when he was not involved), some
crediting other African American women, and most generally gliding over
the phenomenon as if theaters naturally arise in public library basements
(see Brown 1992, 21; Jefferson 1993, 365). What seems as significant as
who formed the theater group was where it was formed. In her recollec-
tions written for Loften Mitchell’s anthology about black theater,
Andrews stresses that groups were mobilized in (or born out of ) the
library: “[S]omewhere along the line a few of us sat in the basement of the
135th Street Library one night, and we began to talk about wanting to
write and produce our own dramas. . . . [W]e began to have our meetings
concerned with the theater at the 135th Street Library. . . . And so the
Harlem Experimental Theater was born” (Andrews in Mitchell 1975, 73).
Andrews stressed the physical space as the ground for these projects; she
invoked the prestige of an official city institution. By stressing the library
where she was librarian, she also marked her central role in this part of
black theater’s history.
So Andrews and some small unidentified group founded the
Harlem Experimental Theater as an incarnation of Krigwa in 1929 and,
with Ernestine Rose’s approval, annexed the library basement for the
group’s projects until Andrews was transferred to a downtown branch two
years later, and the Harlem Experimental Theater relocated to St. Philip’s
Parish nearby, where her plays where staged. Andrews in some coopera-
tion with the white head librarian extended the utilitarian public service
ethos of the library, turning the public space into a temporary house for
this progressive theater.
Later, her own theater work behind her, as head librarian of the
115th Street branch, Andrews welcomed the post–World War II genera-
tion of black theater artists into her branch’s basement. This time around,
however, such unorthodox, off-hours use of library space vexed the library
Theater Near Us 243
authorities. Loften Mitchell recalled admiringly that, when the officials

from the Forty-second Street headquarters confronted Andrews at her
branch, “she told the downtown bosses to go to hell” (Mitchell 1975, 65).
In the end, though, headquarters prevailed, as they evicted theater from
the library basement, restoring the “proper” parameters of the library, at
which point Andrews moved on to other, less provocative projects of pub-
lic culture in the library.
Why focus on a library basement, on where the Harlem theater hap-
pened, and happened so briefly? Recent studies of space emphasize that
space is not fixed, external, politically neutral, or irrelevant. These theo-
ries, sparked by interdisciplinary work in geography and social sciences,
remind those who think about culture that human bodies and social
processes do not occur outside space but are mutually of space. Doreen
Massey formulates space and place as “constructed out of social relations,”
as “social relations ‘stretched out’”—that is, extended (1994, 3). Rather
than one abstract expanse—the space learned in geometry lessons—and
rather than accepted space as a given, or “unproblematic in its identity,”
this conception envisions multiple, simultaneous spaces, “cross-cutting,
intersecting, aligning with one another, or existing in relations of paradox
or antagonism”—so it promotes analysis of how the identities of space
and place are “unfixed, contested, and multiple” (Massey 1994, 3).
Shirley Ardner, approaching her theme of “social maps for women,” artic-
ulates how human engagement acts reciprocally with the physical three-
dimensions in a complex dialectic, as society constructs its spaces—“space
reflects social organization”—but then, in turn, “once space has been
bounded and shaped it is no longer merely a neutral background: it
extends its own influence” (1981, 13). This basic sense of its importance
has proliferated into various emphases and approaches. Some scholars
move on to examine the socially-constructed division of private from
public space; others, following 1970s French theory (of Henri LeFebvre
in particular), work from a three-part taxonomy of spatial practice, offi-
cial representation of space (as depicted in plans and reports), and the
more underground, “representational spaces,” from which people can
resist dominant forms of space (see Sharp 1999, 258). This chapter offers
a modest gesture of foregrounding space within historical cultural studies,
by highlighting a case in which place is paramount. Without redesigning
the façade, or relocating a wall of the edifice, Andrews, in cooperation
with leading Harlem cultural figures and library officials, helped to trans-
form a municipal institutional space into a cultural venue, turning a base-
ment into a respectable theater where African Americans could produce
culture, representing what they understood as their own lives and con-
cerns (including the spaces that mattered to their lives).
As the history of the library suggests, concepts of space are entwined
with concepts of race, a conflation Andrews illustrated in her play A Man
Who Passed. They are also enmeshed with concepts of gender. One strand
of feminist analyses (misleadingly labeled the “cultural” approach) argues
that women’s cultural work navigates a different space and chronology
from that of men, a difference that adjusts the timeline of the Harlem
Renaissance (since several key women’s writings came in the late stretch),
while it also alters the model of space, preferring a vision of multiple cen-
ters, more fluid, multigenerational, and built on mutual support, rather
than a centralized space defined by a single generation of achieving indi-
viduals. Such gendered historical interpretations help to reconceptualize
the larger circulations of cultural production and women’s roles within
them, a view different from, though complementary to this study’s focus
on Regina Andrews’ cultural maneuverings through space.
Historically speaking, from the perspective of Andrews and her
Harlem Renaissance contemporaries, space—or the where—clearly mat-
tered. Her plays show that Negro communities were shaped not only by
who was in them but also where they were. In The Man Who Passed, this
racial geography is expressed in an exchange between the character Fred
and his Harlem barber, as Fred imagines how his racist white boss would
react were he to see how Harlem had been transformed in the era of the
black migrations:
FRED (as if he is thinking aloud ): Gosh! Fitzgerald would have

apoplexy if he came uptown and saw 125th Street black with dark-
ies. (Chuckles to himself.)
VAN: Yes? Well he’d have to get over that first spell so he could go
up to Sugar Hill and see them up as far as 155th and Edgecombe
Ave. (Andrews 1996, 48)
Andrews’ play braids a didactic cautionary tale about abandoning one’s

community with documentary realism that accurately illustrates the dras-
tic transformation in Harlem’s demographics. African Americans and
West Indians migrated to one neighborhood, a condensed cluster, where
they installed a few service businesses, like the barbershop, and patronized
public services, such as the 135th Street library. The theater enacted in the
library basement arose from a demand for theater near us (as well as by,
for, and about), during a cultural moment we have come to identify not
Theater Near Us 245
in terms of time, but of place, “the Harlem Renaissance.” The epithet

underscores this primacy of place and space, even as it misleadingly
obscures the vitality of other sites, such as Washington, D.C., and also of
the circulations across the Atlantic and around the national network of
TOBA (Theater Owner’s Booking Association, a group run by white
managers that scheduled performances of most traveling African Ameri-
can artists).
As a scholarly approach, this concept of space allows the study to
oscillate between the individual agent, Regina Andrews, and the sur-
rounding “structures,” the library building as a node in a city institution,
and the social network of the Harlem Renaissance. In cultural theories of
our early twenty-first century era it is often suspect to emphasize an indi-
vidual, an approach that harkens to the “Great White Men” heroics of
long-standard history and literary studies. Still, for black feminisms and
other feminisms, I do see reason to highlight a particular woman, to recy-
cle concepts of ‘strategy,’ ‘praxis,’ and ‘agency’—remembering bodies,
desires, and black women’s bright ideas even when at the same time we
are questioning categories of agency, gender, and race. The story of how
Andrews and others used this space, the 135th Street library, shifting
between city property and public service and drama studio, illustrates the
larger idea that social and cultural transformations also transform space
and are transformed by space.
12
Into the Sacred Circle,
Out of the Melting Pot
Re/Locations and Homecomings

in Native Women’s Theater
Jaye T. Darby
America was once called the Melting Pot, but we are taking
out of the pot what didn’t melt: our voices, culture, styles, and
ways of storytelling.
—Diane Glancy, “Native American Theater
and the Theater That Will Come”
While reflective of rich diversity among communities, home has always

held a unique meaning among the over five hundred First Nations in
North America. Far more than a just a geographic location, home, accord-
ing to Paula Gunn Allen (1992), Inés Hernández-Ávila (1995), Winona
LaDuke (2005), and Jace Weaver (1997), is the centuries-old source of
spirituality, the site of intergenerational continuity and community, and
the continuance of traditions and sacred responsibilities. Yet, for the most
part, as Vine DeLoria Jr. observes throughout the recent history of indige-
nous peoples in the Americas since European encounter, “the major thrust
has been one of dispossession of the natives by those colonizing the con-
tinent” (1985, 4). In the nineteenth century, Cherokee men, women, and
children pushed out of their homes at gunpoint onto the Trail of Tears;
Chief Joseph and the Ni Mii Puu (Nez Perce) forced from their home-
lands; and the Lakota driven from Paha Sapa, the sacred Black Hills, are
notable examples.
Perhaps lesser known but also devastating were twentieth-century
federal policies terminating rights to Native Americans on reservations.
247
248 JAYE T. DARBY
Beginning in the 1950s, governmental termination and relocation poli-

cies again displaced large numbers of Native Americans from their lands,
homes, and traditions, relocating them to large urban areas, where today
over 60 percent of Native Americans live (Cornell 1988; Fixico 1986).
Rather than promised jobs and opportunities as many Natives hoped for,
too often poverty, isolation, and displacement from their homelands and
powerful cultures became the measure of urban life.
Thus, while relocation as a legal term generally refers to the 1950s
federal policy, relocation in contemporary Native literature has broader
connotations. As Inés Hernández-Ávila discusses in her insightful essay,
“Relocations upon Relocations,” her use of the “term ‘relocation’ deliber-
ately recalls the historical fact of relocation of Native peoples,” and “the
policies which created the urban Native populations we have today, and
the policies which forced Native children to be sent away from their
homes to boarding schools” (Hernández-Ávila 1995, 495). Relocation in
this sense includes both physical and cultural dispossession from home-
lands, tribal cultures, and spiritual traditions.
While recent developments in Native theater share these concerns
with relocation as geographic dislocation, imposed poverty, cultural dis-
ruption, forced colonization, and religious oppression, a growing body of
Native women’s theater, as suggested by the opening quotation by Diane
Glancy, Cherokee, further contest the devastating consequences of forced
removals and federal relocation policies and perform an alternative, a cre-
ative process of re/location and homecoming—Native resistance, recla-
mation, recovery, and renewal on stage. As Inés Hernández-Ávila (1995),
Beth Brant (1997), and Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird (1997) have discussed,
Native women’s writing often provides homecoming on a number of lev-
els—spiritual, cultural, artistic, and political. According to Hernández-
Ávila, “For many activist Native women of this hemisphere, the concern
with ‘home’ involves concern with ‘homeland.’ Even when Native women
activists no longer reside on their ancestral land bases (though many still
do) they continue to defend the tribal sovereignty of their own commu-
nities as well as communities of other indigenous peoples” (1995, 492).
In the case of contemporary Native performing arts, in this chapter, I sug-
gest that through the integration of Native aesthetics, grounded in tradi-
tional ceremonial values, with contemporary issues, performance itself is
integral to homecoming and centers the work. As I wrote in a 2002 essay,
“While reflective of the great diversity among Indian Nations and the
multiplicity of cultural expressions, re-imagined Native theater shifts
location to a Native stage world and reconceptualizes the theatrical expe-
Into the Sacred Circle, Out of the Melting Pot 249
rience by placing Native values, aesthetics, traditions, and issues at the

core of each performance and employing theatrical vocabularies and nar-
rative forms intrinsic to these values” (Darby 2002, 76).
As an illustration of this transformative new direction in Native the-
ater, this chapter offers a dramaturgical analysis of three major works:
SongCatcher: A Native Interpretation of the Story of Frances Densmore by
Marcie Rendon (2003), White Earth Anishinabe, The Woman Who Was a
Red Deer Dressed for the Deer Dance by Diane Glancy (2002), Cherokee,
and No Home but the Heart (An Assembly of Memories) by Daystar/Rosalie
Jones (2003), Pembina Chippewa. These three works, differing in tribal
traditions, dramatic form, and length, showcase the diversity and innova-
tion of expression in contemporary Native American women’s theater. In
this analysis, I consider how each theater piece, based on specific tribal
traditions and histories, contests the devastating consequences of reloca-
tion and decenters colonization by performing an alternative—a creative
homecoming that honors Native perspectives, values, and aesthetics.
Drawing on the critical work of Paula Gunn Allen (1983, 1992, 1998),
Laguna Pueblo/Sioux scholar and writer, I further suggest that central to
staging these homecomings in Native women’s theater is the integration
of Native performing arts grounded in specific tribal spiritual traditions.
As Gunn Allen (1992) explains in her seminal book, The Sacred Hoop:
Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, Native American
spiritual practices, while highly nuanced and reflective of the multiplicity
of communities, traditions, and practices, are millenniums old and con-
nected to specific creation stories tied to geographic locations with unique
spiritual relationships and responsibilities to sacred homelands and mem-
bers of the community—past, present, and future. According to Gunn
Allen, Native traditional arts play an integral role: “The tribes seek—
through song, ceremony, legend, sacred stories (myths), and tales—to
embody, articulate, and share reality, to bring the isolated, private self into
harmony with this reality, to verbalize the sense of the majesty and rever-
ent mystery of all things, and to actualize, in language, those truths that
give humanity its greatest significance and dignity” (1992, 55).
SONGCATCHER: A NATIVE INTERPRETATION

OF THE STORY OF FRANCES DENSMORE
In her artist’s statement to SongCatcher: A Native Interpretation of the Story

of Frances Densmore, a three-act play, Marcie Rendon explains that her
250 JAYE T. DARBY
goal as a writer “involves the interweaving of Native people’s spiritual real-

ity coexisting alongside present-time physical reality” (2002, 2). Rendon,
an award-winning writer and an internationally known activist, continues
that as a playwright she is “interested in combining Native oral tradition
with Western playwriting” and “strive[s] as creator and writer for the same
integration my ancestors had of dialogue, music, and movement by using
the modern stage and tools of the playwright,” an integration evident in
SongCatcher (Rendon 2003, 2).
SongCatcher, which debuted in 1998 in Minneapolis at the Great
American History Theater, integrates Ojibwe sacred song traditions into
an urban context. Probing issues of cultural and spiritual dislocation, the
play focuses on the lives of a young Ojibwe couple, Chris and Jack, who
live in an inner-city apartment in the 1990s. Like many urban Natives,
the couple struggles financially as Chris works as a sanitation worker and
Jack is often unemployed. Yet, the greater struggle is spiritual between
Chris, grounded in traditional Ojibwe knowledge, and Jack, emblematic
of many relocated urban Indians, alienated by his urban upbringing and
desperately trying to reclaim his past and Native identity. However, rather
than setting up a binary opposition between urban and traditional
Ojibwe people, by interweaving dream sequences and making manifest
Ojibwe spirituality on stage, Marcie Rendon artfully constructs contem-
porary Native urban life as a liminal space in which to heal the past and
recover Ojibwe spirituality for a new generation. Here SongCatcher com-
plements Rendon’s earlier children’s play, Bring the Children Home, which,
according Ann Haugo, Rendon viewed as a “healing journey of finding
your center/your base/your home” for urban Native youth (2000 247).
SongCatcher opens in an Ojibwe encampment in the 1880s with
Spirit Woman singing Ojibwe songs to those sleeping (Rendon 2003).
The stage presence of Spirit Woman enacting this tradition of giving a
personal song through dreams connects the performance to sacred home-
lands and the ancestral past. The next scene offers a stark contrast. Phys-
ically relocated and culturally distanced from this traditional home, Jack,
struggling to find his own personal Ojibwe song, is sitting in his run-
down apartment and playing a tape-recorded Ojibwe song for Bill, an
elder. As it becomes clear to Bill that this is a tape recording of a very old
Red Lake song, he becomes uneasy. At the end of the tape, the voice of
anthropologist Frances Densmore intrudes, and again Bill questions Jack’s
plans to use the tape for his song. Culturally compromised, Jack defends
Densmore’s actions of recording Ojibwe songs by insisting that she was
just trying to save the songs—the mainstream anthropological justifica-
tion. Behind the men, Midé images appear, connecting the taped songs to
sacred songs and the “Midewiwin, or the Great Medicine Society,” whose
members “believe,” according to Gerald Vizenor, “that music and the
knowledge and use of herbal medicine extend human life” (1984, 26).
These Ojibwe images visually contradict the legitimacy of Densmore’s
actions in taking the songs, undermining Jack’s position in using her
work. As Rendon explains, “For Native peoples of this continent, stories
of social, familial, and historical consequence were passed generation to
generation, either through the practice of oral storytelling; the creation of
songs, sometimes with accompanying dance movement; or, as in the case
of the Ojibwe Midé religious society, pictographs inscribed on birchbark
scrolls” (2003, 4).
However, cultural and spiritual loss becomes increasingly apparent
in Jack’s response. Raised on country western music and Christian hymns
and unaware of the larger spiritual dangers of learning a sacred song
recorded by a white anthropologist, Jack remains insistent on learning the
song for the upcoming powwow at Leech Lake. Gently Bill as an Ojibwe
elder encourages Jack to listen for his own song from the spirits and
reminds him that in the old days people received their songs through
fasts, dreams, or as gifts. In the Ojibwe tradition, according to Gerald
Vizenor, “The spirit teacher told the first people on the earth that they
‘must fast and find out things by dreams and that if they paid attention
to these dreams they would learn how to heal the sick. The people listened
and fasted and found in dreams how to teach their children and do every-
thing’” (1984, 3). So important are dreams in the Ojibwe tradition that
Vizenor continues that “woodland identities turned on dreams and
visions” (1984, 24).
Thus for Jack, according to Bill and Chris, the path back to his
Ojibwe identity is based on traditional Ojibwe spiritual practice. Yet, as
the performance begins, Jack, a victim of assimilationist educational poli-
cies, privileges Western ways of knowing over Native ones, thereby per-
petuating a cycle of dispossession, evident in the lives of many urban
Natives. Overcoming his current estrangement can only be achieved
through conversations with elders, fasts, dreams, and ceremonies, not by
reading a book written by an anthropologist. However, disconnected
from his tribal past and traditional spirituality, Jack instead seeks a short
cut to find his song through Frances Densmore’s book, a decision that
triggers an epistemological and spiritual struggle between Western and
traditional Ojibwe knowledge throughout the rest of the play—key dra-
maturgical issues.
252 JAYE T. DARBY
The next scene—the construction of a dream sequence—reveals

two contrasting stage worlds—one of the traditional Dakota community
first with returning hunters and then with Chris and Jack as a traditional
couple falling in love and the other with Frances and Margaret (Maggie)
Densmore in their parlor. As she hears songs from the Dakota encamp-
ment, Frances tries them on her piano, a jarring counterpoint to songs
heard in the encampment. In the next scene, a continuation of Chris’s
dream finds Maggie Densmore sneaking into the Dakota encampment.
Chris wakes with a start as Jack comes in, and a fight ensues as Chris dis-
covers that Jack has also copied sacred pictographs from the Densmore
book to put on his drum and continues to study her book, rather than
learn from an elder. In response to Jack’s view that “they’re just drawings,”
she explains, “They’re sacred. Our people went to prison or mental insti-
tutions for practicing our religion” (21).
Revealing his frustrations over having parents with mainstream aspi-
rations and having been the only Native in an all-white school, Jack again
insists that he only wants to learn about being an Ojibwe. Challenging
Jack’s Western conception of “learning” from books, and fearing his lack
of respect for the departed, Chris again articulates a traditional view of
learning that is based on spirituality and warns Jack that his actions may
be an invitation to spirits to enter their apartment. By honoring the spir-
itual beliefs of her people, Chris displays what Paula Gunn Allen describes
as “a sense of propriety” appropriate to the situation (1998, 41). However,
Jack reveals the extent of Western colonization in his life by perceiving the
singers as dead and gone, rather than as living spirits. As Jace Weaver,
Cherokee scholar, writes, “Colonialism succeeds by subverting traditional
notions of culture and identity and by imposing social structures and con-
structs incompatible with traditional society” (1987, 20)
In scene 6 of the first act, Jack’s next dream sequence reveals the
competing voices in his life—the traditional voice of Spirit Woman
singing him his song and the colonized voices of his parents urging him
to do his homework and do well in football. When he finally hears Spirit
Woman in the dream, he asks his mother about her. Both his parents,
caught in the colonizers’ mindset, encourage him to forget the past, his
father reminding him of the beatings his grandparents endured in board-
ing school whenever they tried to remember the old ways—further man-
ifestations of the devastating effects of federal educational policies. Jack’s
dream fades, and lights softly frame Old Man Spirit and Spirit Woman.
Having tried in vain to give Jack his song through his dreams, Spirit
Woman despairs over the cultural dispossession of the Anishinabe young
people—loss of language, inability to interpret dreams, and lack of

knowledge of ceremonies, and Jack’s current fascination with Frances
Densmore. Reminding her of the power of the Creator, Old Man Spirit
reassures her that although centuries of European colonization have
silenced the people and denied them their traditions, the Anishinabe chil-
dren will prevail and “come home”: “They took our teachings and locked
them up. They took our people away from the natural world. Boarding
schools, prisons, adoptive families. They try to lock up the souls of our
people. But the children are strong, Spirit Woman, their spirits are strong.
They will come home. There is a natural order to all creation. The eagle
still flies” (25–26).
Throughout the second act, a spiritual imbalance in the couple’s
relationship and apartment ensues on stage as the tensions between Chris
and Jack escalate as Jack’s entanglement with the spirit of Frances Dens-
more deepens. Chris, who views Densmore as “some woman who ripped
us off in the first place,” argues with Jack, who seems coopted by both
Densmore and Western accounts of her accomplishments (27). Again, she
reminds him that if he wants to learn his Ojibwe traditions, he needs to
go to an elder and recommends that he see Bill. Jack remains convinced
that study of the book is sufficient, still unaware of the spiritual conse-
quences about which Chris warns him.
The staging further makes manifest Ojibwe spiritual beliefs about
the living presence of ancestors. Spirit Woman and Old Man Spirit, along
with the spirits of Frances, Maggie, and Lizzie enter the apartment,
occupy the stage, and participate in the play’s action. As Jack gets further
and further drawn to Frances’s work, objects move, knocks mysteriously
sound, and cigarette smoke fills the apartment. Scenes flash of Frances’s
growing obsession and arrogance in the past as she collected songs and her
growing complicity in Native oppression. Jack’s dream of himself as
Geronimo confronting Frances at the Chicago World’s Fair reveals the
grave peril of relying on Frances’s work, rather than following the tradi-
tional spiritual path to learn his song—losing one’s soul. After the dream,
still in the thrall of Frances, Jack becomes more and more listless, missing
work and practicing on the drum, the same drum Frances as a spirit now
uses. He even buys a keyboard, so he can practice the musical notation in
Frances’s book.
On stage, equally persistent in her pursuit of Jack, is Spirit
Woman, who appears in the apartment, at the convenience store, and at
the local casino. A spiritual tug of war physically ensues between Spirit
Woman and Frances as her presence begins to reach Jack, pulling him
254 JAYE T. DARBY
away from Frances. Jack repeatedly awakens after hearing her song in
the distance but is still unable to remember it. Coming home tired one
night and angered by Jack’s withdrawal and growing spiritual malaise,
Chris becomes fully aware of the spiritual imbalance caused by the spir-
its of Frances and Maggie and ceremonially smudges the apartment to
cleanse it. The staging of this ceremonial smudging signals a major shift
in the couple’s deteriorating relationship and the play. For Spirit
Woman and Old Man Spirit also present in the apartment suggest gen-
tleness, rather than anger and tell Chris to pray. Purified by the smoke
and grounded in prayer, Chris calls Jack back into the room, shows him
feathers she received from a Maori man and from her grandma, com-
forts him about the song he keeps trying to remember from his dreams,
and gives him a stone from an Australian Aboriginal woman who said
the stone had sacred power to help hear the spirits. The sage smoke pro-
vides a barrier among the spirits of Frances and Maggie and Jack, assert-
ing control over their personal intrusion and the larger intrusion of
mainstream culture.
Act 3 culminates in the spiritual homecoming Old Man Spirit fore-
saw earlier and presents a vision of spiritual healing for urban Natives.
Transforming the apartment into a ceremonial ground, the staging con-
nects urban existence to the mythic ceremonial tradition, in which
according to Paula Gunn Allen, the “tribal concept of time is of timeless-
ness, as the concept of space is of multidimensionality” (1992, 147). The
ceremony, lead by Bill, first reveals the betrayal and tragedy of Main’gans
who sang sacred Midé songs out of vanity for Frances Densmore. Then
offering healing and asserting the enduring power of the sacred in Native
life, Spirit Woman’s voice fills the stage:
I sing the songs of ages past
Nothing sacred is ever lost
No matter what they take
Our spirits still live on (73)
As she moves on stage, she is joined by Jack, who sings with her, finally
in possession of his song. After the ceremony ends, once again Jack and
Chris are in their apartment with the spirits of Frances and Maggie now
gone. Jack, now spiritually grounded, is ready to go back to work and
build a life with Chris. By interweaving the Frances Densmore narrative
of spiritual ruin with Jack’s story of spiritual recovery, SongCatcher
reclaims spiritual autonomy within the Ojibwe tradition and affirms the
living power of Native spirituality in contemporary urban life.
THE WOMAN WHO WAS A RED DEER

DRESSED FOR THE DEER DANCE
The Woman Who Was a Red Deer Dressed for the Deer Dance by Diane
Glancy, an award-winning playwright, poet, and novelist, deals with the
long-term psychological, cultural, and spiritual repercussions of Cherokee
Removal in the 1830s and the current struggles of a young woman, alien-
ated from her Cherokee past. The one-act play was first performed on
December 7, 1995, at the American Indian Community House in New
York, directed by Siouxsan Monson, and later published in 1998 (Glancy
2002, 205). Since then it has been reprinted three times, most recently in
Diane Glancy’s anthology, American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays
(2002), to which I refer.
Identifying the work as a “dramatic/poetic piece” in her introduc-
tion to the play, Glancy locates the piece within both Cherokee spiritual
traditions and contemporary experiences: “The story of Ahw’uste was
taken from ‘Doi on Ahu’usti’ and ‘Asudi on Ahw’usti,’ Friends of Thun-
der, Tales of the Oklahoma Cherokees, edited by Frank and Anna Kil-
patrick, pieces of the old language (Cherokee), and contemporary mate-
rials (the granddaughter’s life in the soup kitchen and dance bars)” (2002,
3). Pivotal to the spirituality of the piece is this integration of the stories
of Ahw’uste, the Cherokee spirit deer, from Cherokee elders. Like most of
Glancy’s work, the piece also has autobiographical overtones. In “Two
Dresses,” Glancy openly writes about personal cultural dislocation and
forced assimilation in her own life, growing up with a Cherokee father
and an English-German mother, explaining that “it was my mother who
presented her white part of my heritage as whole” (1987, 169). Yet,
according to Glancy, the memory of her quiet Cherokee grandmother
continues to inspire her writing.
Through the construction of a series of “scenelets” that integrates
dialogue, memory, poetry, and story, Glancy at once introduces a highly
contemporary style of Native theater grounded in traditional concerns
with spirituality and intergenerational continuity as Grandmother and
Girl, her granddaughter, two archetypal figures, struggle with issues of
tradition and continuance. The first scene opens with an intertextual con-
nection to Cherokee sacred stories as the Girl asks her grandmother,
“Have you heard of Ahw’uste?” (5). In response to her granddaughter’s
question, Grandmother, in the role of elder and keeper of Cherokee tra-
ditions, recalls seeing her at Deer Creek and that the deer “made the songs
happen” (6).
256 JAYE T. DARBY
As the piece continues, the girl, assimilated and alienated from her
grandmother, contests her grandmother’s belief system. Thus, on stage
Grandmother and Girl engage in an epistemological and a spiritual strug-
gle between Western and Native views. According to Paula Gunn Allen,
the “dualistic division . . . between what is material and what is spiritual,”
characteristic of much Western thought does not exist in traditional
Native views of spirituality, which “regards the two as different expres-
sions of the same reality” (1992, 60). In a recent interview, Glancy dis-
cussed how in her work, she seeks to integrate “the seen and unseen
world” and explained, “In the past, the ancestors can show up at anytime;
it’s a living, fluid narrative” (quoted in Cheng 2002, 38). Pushing the clas-
sic generation clash further thorough intensified dialogue, the perfor-
mance raises the stakes by focusing on cultural dislocation and spiritual
continuance. On the one hand, the grandmother, embracing Cherokee
spirituality, objects to living in a “world,” where one is “reduced to what
can be seen” (8) and tries lead her granddaughter into the “unseen” world
of spirits and sacred power. On the other, the girl, echoing a positivist
position reflective of much of modern American life, wants her grand-
mother to focus on “the seen”—money for truck payments and gas, her
yearning for a steady man, and the demands of a low paying job in a soup
kitchen. She vehemently objects to her grandmother’s refusal to recognize
that these contemporary pressures force her to “go into the seeable—live
away from your world” (8). Girl’s view is aligned with what Marilou
Awiakta describes as the conquerors’ “hardness—the hardness of mind
split from spirit” (1984, 126). Simultaneously drawn and repelled by
Grandmother’s stories about the spirits, Girl yearns to be part of this tra-
dition while she rejects the impossibility of its demands in her current life,
where assimilation seems to be a requirement for survival. This perspec-
tive is consistent with Gunn Allen’s observation that colonization “affects
a people’s understanding of their universe, their place within that uni-
verse, the kinds of values they must embrace and actions they must make
to remain safe and whole within that universe” (1992, 90).
Glancy poetically illustrates this chasm between the mythic and the
positivistic through the girl’s uneasy imagery of her grandmother becom-
ing more like a deer: “You stuff twigs in your shoes to make them fit your
hooves. But I know hooves are there” (10). In a humorous, yet poignant
monologue, the girl focuses on the physical world, not the spiritual, and
becomes concerned about what to do with the four feet, the tail, and how
to find a job as a deer, concluding that her grandmother’s instruction is
only making her life more difficult. Cut off from her past, she poignantly
voices her sense of alienation: “I already know I don’t fit anywhere—I

don’t need to be reminded—“ (10). She then accepts her own rootlessness
as an existential condition: “I have to pass through this world not having
a place but I’ll go anyway” (11). The granddaughter’s acceptance of her
alienation foregrounds her displacement from her Cherokee heritage.
According to Paula Gunn Allen, “Belonging is a basic assumption for tra-
ditional Indians, and estrangement is seen as so abnormal that narratives
and rituals that restore the estranged to his or her place within the cul-
tural matrix abound” (1992, 127).
As the performance evolves, Grandmother endeavors to provide her
granddaughter a lasting spiritual legacy that will break the constrictions
of her colonized mind and provide her communal bonds. Gently she
explains to the girl that only through a connection to the past will she be
able to live a fuller life. Grandmother intensifies her efforts with a story
of seeing Ahw’uste. A breakthrough occurs when the girl momentarily
moved by the power of the story asks, “Your deer dress is the way you felt
when you saw the deer?” (14). Grandmother responds, “When I saw
Ahw’uste, yes. My deer dress is the way I felt, transformed by the power
of ceremony. The idea of it in the forest of my head” (14). Yet, the girl
trapped in her estrangement resists this leap from her material worldview
to a spiritual one. Increasingly angered by her grandmother’s reliance on
stories, she demands, “Speak without your stories. Just once. What are
you without your deer dress? What are you without your story of
Ahw’uste?” (14). Articulating the living continuity of sacred stories,
Grandmother responds, “We’re carriers of our stories and histories. We’re
nothing without them” (14). Grandmother’s insistence on stories for con-
tinuance reflects a deeply held traditional orientation, one in which,
according to LeAnne Howe, “Native stories are power. They create peo-
ple. They author tribes” (1999, 118). Jace Weaver shares a similar view,
“Indeed, it may be that the People cannot have life outside of stories, their
existence contingent upon the telling and hearing of communal stories”
(1997, 40). In the play, the tension increases as the girl counters in the
colonized voice of individualism, “We carry ourselves” (14).
The Woman Who Was a Red Deer Dressed for the Deer Dance culmi-
nates as Grandmother begins to pray, “Gu’-s-di i-da-da-dv-hni My rela-
tives—” (17). In a response to her prayers, at the end of the performance,
Girl in a lyrically constructed monologue finally accepts Grandmother’s
teachings as she understands the story of Ahw’uste, embraces her Chero-
kee spirituality, and symbolically designs her own deer dress. She thereby
redefines herself in contemporary terms: “I’m sewing my own red-deer
258 JAYE T. DARBY
dress. It’s different from my grandma’s. Mine is a dress of words. I see

Ahw’uste also” (18). Here her “red-deer dress” circles back to her grand-
mother’s story of Ahw’uste at the beginning of the play and celebrates the
oral tradition in which “words” have power and “carry meaning,” accord-
ing to Glancy (1987, 170). This circularity, characteristic of older tribal
narratives, guides this highly contemporary piece, provides a homecom-
ing for the girl, and affirms the living power of story on stage.
NO HOME BUT THE HEART

(AN ASSEMBLY OF MEMORIES)
Rosalie Jones, whose professional name is Daystar, is an internationally

recognized dancer and choreographer (Magill 1998). In 1980, she
founded DAYSTAR: Contemporary Dance-Drama of Indian America,
whose work Hanay Geiogamah described as “some of the most experi-
mental, bracing, and compelling Native-theme dance works imaginable
for the times” (1995, 130). In No Home but the Heart (An Assembly of
Memories), which opened in Santa Fe in 1999 at the Maria Benitez
Cabaret, Daystar furthers the dance-drama, a new Native performing arts
aesthetic, which she developed, based on the fusion of ceremonial tradi-
tions of dance, song, and story with modern dance. In her keynote
address, “Inventing Native Modern Dance: A Tough Trip through Par-
adise,” at the Twenty-third Annual American Indian Workshop at Trinity
College in Dublin, Ireland, in 2002, she emphasized the underlying spir-
itual underpinnings of modern Native dance: “In the native world view,
dance and song are intimately fused to the ceremonials and the ceremo-
nials are tied to the cosmologies, and the cosmologies are tied to the life
and being of the Creator. It is because of the Creator that we are able to
sing and dance and therefore, to give thanks for his many gifts to us”
(Jones 2002).
In No Home but the Heart, Daystar explores the physical dis-
placement and spiritual return of her mother’s French-Cree family,
who were forced out of Canada in the late 1800s to drift throughout
the Northern Plains in the United States (Jones 2003). Integral to the
staging throughout the piece is the Panel of Ancestors with Daystar’s
great-grandmother, Susan Bigknife, in the center, framed by her grand-
mother and mother, which serves to honor the ancestors and connect
the story to the past. Through twelve scenes interweaving story, dance,
and music, the work chronicles four generations of Native women,
their grueling struggles against oppression, and their fierce determina-

tion to maintain their family and tribal ties, beginning with Great-
Grandmother in the nineteenth century, and ending with Daughter in
current times.
The Panel of Ancestors alone on stage opens the piece. Then lights
dim, and in the darkness, a voiceover by Great-Grandmother as a young
woman in 1880 begins the family’s long story of dispossession:
I don’t remember where I was born.
Maybe out of a wooden-cart or on a buffalo hunt,
I don’t remember and nobody wrote it down.
I do know that my sister and me were taken from our
parents and raised by the nuns—you know. (83)
Bitterly she recalls that the nuns’ education must not have been very help-
ful because her sister threw her off a steamer and deserted her on the
prairies. Through the Traveling Dance, Great-Grandmother as a young
woman portrays her fear and confusion at being left behind, abandoned
and friendless in a strange place.
Scene 2 shifts to a voiceover of Great-Grandmother in 1880 as she
reminisces about the brutality of her three husbands—the first one who
abandoned her, the second one who shot and tried to kill her and later
sickened and died, and the third one “who put out my eye” (85). In the
face of this adversity, the spirits comfort, strengthen, teach, and guide her:
That’s when the spirits spoke to me.
That’s when I learned the secrets of wind and water
and roots and leaves.
That’s when I learned how to doctor. (85)
During the Medicine Dance, Great-Grandmother ceremonially purifies a
sacred space on stage and gives thanks to the Four Directions. Even
though she is physically displaced, through this dance, she enters a cere-
monial space connected to the spirits. This spiritual connection resonates
throughout the rest of the piece. As Daystar writes, “While the achieve-
ment of survival can be manifest in a people’s material culture, it is in
their songs, dances, and oratories that the testament of their enduring
spirit is truly found” (1992, 169).
Scene 3, entitled “The French Connection,” flashes back to 1783,
providing an expositional bridge from the two opening scenes to the
next six scenes. The Narrator, alone on stage, sardonically provides a
history lesson in the Canadian government’s complicity in dispossessing
260 JAYE T. DARBY
Great-Grandmother’s community, the Métis. Describing the emergence

of Métis culture as “a wonderful blend of the Indian and the French,”
which developed through intermarriage between the French traders and
the Cree and Chippewa, Narrator then parodies the Canadian govern-
mental policies, which required one to be French or Indian, not “both,”
resulting in a rebellion led by Louis Reil in 1885, who was subsequently
hanged (87). Crushing this rebellion forced a “native exodus to the
U.S.” of Métis, Cree, and Chippewa (Yates 2003, C4).
The next six scenes graphically thrust the audience into the devas-
tating physical realities of this forced migration and the cultural conse-
quences to Great-Grandmother, Grandmother, and Mother. In scene 4,
entitled “The Specter of Death,” set in 1836–1837, the stage convulses
with The Smallpox Dance. The dancer, wearing a smallpox mask, a red
winding-sheet, and pale shirt and leggings covered with smallpox, graph-
ically embodies the agonies of the smallpox epidemic that decimated
Northern Plains peoples in 1837. In scene 5, Daystar deftly interweaves
her family history while contesting destructive U.S. Indian policies. Punc-
tuated by the refrain, “the Indians were in the way” (89), Narrator’s
monologue exposes the ideology of the westward movement, the imposi-
tion of reservations, the “ROTTEN POLITICS” over who was allowed
to become an enrolled Chippewa tribal member, and the treachery of the
“Ten Cent Treaty,” in which the U.S. government paid “93,000 dollars
for one million acres of land” (90).
Set in the early 1900s, scenes 6 and 7 introduce Grandmother to
the stage as she enacts her struggles to survive on the margins of both
mainstream American life and her native community. In scene 6, the
Clog Dance fills the stage with the charm and vitality of the Métis cul-
ture. In sharp juxtaposition, Narrator’s monologue relates the ensuing
homelessness and subsequent poverty of thousands, including Grand-
mother and the Little Shell Chippewa Band as they were no longer rec-
ognized as federally enrolled members of a tribe (92). As they “moved
farther west, trying to find a home, any kind of home,” Narrator con-
tinues that they faced the destruction of the buffalo “and scavenged for
buffalo bones—left over from the carcasses of thousands of dead buf-
falo,” slaughtered as part of annihilative federal policies against the Plains
people (92).
Scene 7 heightens the intensity of this suffering and poverty. In a
voiceover as an old woman, Grandmother ruthlessly deconstructs the
U.S. government’s promise that they “could live in new way,” based on
farming (93):
Living the ‘new’ way was a trade-off of sorts.

We traded elder wisdom—for no wisdom.
There were no doctors, not even aspirin
for childbirth and gunshot wounds and TB
and alcoholism. (93)
In the compelling Chair Dance, Grandmother dances from youth to age,
physicalizing her escalating pain as she gave birth to seven children with
no medical care and the resultant agony of her fallen womb. The high-
backed chair she uses sits center stage, a stark symbol of European domi-
nation. Scene 8, set in 1940, ushers in Mother as a maid, working two
jobs to survive and striving to realize the American dream “to join those
ladies at the top of the hill” (96).
The final four scenes, through both story and choreography, enact
a major shift from displacement to self-determination and return Mother
and Daughter home to their Chippewa traditions. In scene 9, set in 1950,
Mother in a voiceover laments the psychological price of assimilation and
owning “a house next to those nice ladies on the hill”: “I knew who I was,
on the inside. But on the outside, I became the ‘invisible’ Indian” (97).
Her dance, the Balancing Dance, begins with Mother in a ball gown,
white full-length gloves, and a mask with feathers and enacts her seeming
acceptance of mainstream culture as she waltzes around the stage. Narra-
tor attacks her mixed heritage with full-blood taunts. Silencing these anx-
ieties raised by her mixed heritage, as a Native chant replaces the waltz
music, the dancer playing Mother strips off her mask and gloves, takes a
rattle from Narrator, and ceremonially honors her ancestors. Then,
according to the stage directions, “she begins a round dance step, in a small
circle” (99). The song and dance intensify, and Mother concludes “with
four vigorous shakes of the rattle and a triumphant woman’s call,” echoing
Great-Grandmother in scene 2 (99).
Throughout scenes 10 and 11, Daughter embraces her ancestors
through moving voiceovers and choreography. In scene 10, set in pre-
sent day, Daughter, in the Mistaken Identity Dance, rejects mispercep-
tions about her identity with a “karate blow” (101). Then in scene 11,
Daughter embodies her heritage as she does the Remembering Dance,
part 2, reenacting the earlier choreography of her grandmother. In a
voiceover, as she stands in front of the Panel of Ancestors, she claims her
rightful place:
I am not ‘half ’ anything.
I am the sum total of my ancestors.
262 JAYE T. DARBY
I am my mother. I am my father. I am my
Grandmother. I am my Great-Grandmother.
I am the living legacy of the woman who survived
the Red Death of 1837. (102)
Only then does she reveal the official letter from the Bureau of Indian Affairs
she received four days after her mother’s death, designating her “A DESCEN-
DENT OF THE PEMBINA CHIPPEWA PURSUANT TO THE PROVISIONS
OF THE ACT OF DECEMBER 31, 1982, PUBLIC LAW 97–462” (103).
Through the artistic choice of Jingle Dress dancing, Daystar mas-
terfully fills the stage with Chippewa spirituality in scene 12, “No Home
but the Heart,” set in “The Timeless Present,” which opens with the jin-
gling sound of the cones of the dress and continues with the dance (104).
The tradition of the Jingle Dress Dance, according to Tara Browner, orig-
inated in “Whitefish Bay, a reserve village located on the shores of Lake
of the Woods in southwestern Ontario” and draws on the belief “that
what the Creator or guardian spirit gives to an individual through a vision
is a complete understanding of what they have experienced” (2002,
53–54). As scene 12 unfolds, by retelling the story of Maggie White’s ill-
ness, her father’s vision, and the healing power of the Jingle Dress Dance,
Narrator recalls the spiritual origins of the dance for the audience. Thus,
Daystar’s final dance sequence, the Spirits Dance, brings the play full cir-
cle to Great-Grandmother’s earlier Medicine Dance (104). As Browner
explains: “One of the most profound elements of Jingle Dress dancing is
its spiritual power, which originates as an energy generated from the
sound of the cones that sing out to the spirits when dancers lift their feet
in time with the drum. The very act of dancing in this dress constitutes a
prayer for healing” (2002, 53). The performance of the Jingle Dress
Dance transforms the stage as those on stage dance a homecoming that
resonates with their homelands and honors their sacred ties. Describing
the underlying spiritual nature of her work and that of many others
engaged in Native modern dance in her 2002 keynote address, Daystar
avowed: “We are climbing the ladder to the Creator’s House. We are crying
and singing and dancing for the visions of our future” (Jones 2002). No
Home but the Heart is a moving vision of recovery and hope.
CLOSING REFLECTIONS
According to Paula Gunn Allen, “There is surely cause to weep, to grieve;

but greater than ugliness, the endurance of tribal beauty is our reason to
sing, to greet the coming day and the restored life and hope it brings”
(1992, xi). SongCatcher: A Native Interpretation of the Story of Frances
Densmore by Marcie Rendon integrates Ojibwe song traditions into
urban life. The Woman Who Was a Red Deer Dressed for the Deer Dance
by Diane Glancy celebrates the power of story to transform. No Home
but the Heart (An Assembly of Memories) by Daystar/Rosalie Jones inte-
grates story and dance to honor the continuity of family and community.
As carriers of “tribal beauty,” each uniquely performs homecoming and
affirms the sacred.
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About the Contributors
CHRISTA DAVIS ACAMPORA is an associate professor of philosophy at

Hunter College and The Graduate Center of City University of New
York. She is author of numerous articles and has edited several volumes,
including Cultural Sites of Critical Insight (with Angela Cotten, SUNY
Press, 2007) and A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile
and Brutal (with Ralph Acampora, 2004). Her main interests are in
moral psychology, aesthetics, contemporary political theory, and Niet-
zsche studies.
RITCH CALVIN is a Lecturer in Women’s Studies at SUNY Stony Brook.

His primary research interests are Mexicana and Chicana literature and
aesthetics and feminist science fiction. His recent publications have been
about works by Philip K. Dick, Isabella Ríos, and Ana Castillo.
JAYE T. DARBY is co-founder and co-director with Hanay Geiogamah

of Project HOOP (Honoring Our Origins and People through Native
Theater, Education, and Community Development). Project HOOP is
a North American initiative to advance Native performing arts artisti-
cally, academically, and professionally, based at the University of Cali-
fornia, Los Angeles. Dr. Darby is the co-editor of the anthology Keepers
of the Morning Star: An Anthology of Native Women’s Theater with
Stephanie Fitzgerald (2003). With Hanay Geiogamah, she co-edited
Stories of Our Way: An Anthology of American Indian Plays (1999) and
American Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader (2000). She also
teaches in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
at UCLA.
DR. PHOEBE FARRIS (Powhatan) is a Full Professor of Art and Design/

Women’s Studies at Purdue University. As an author, exhibit curator, pho-
tographer, and professor, Dr. Farris explores issues involving race, gender,
indigenous sovereignty, Native American Studies, peace, and social justice
from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her books, Voices of Color: Art and
283
284 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Society in the Americas and Women Artists of Color: A Bio-critical Source-

book to 20th Century Artists in the Americas, create a dialogue about the
intersections of social activism and the arts.
MS. NANDITA GUPTA is an officer in the Indian Administrative Service.

She is currently holding the post of Additional Deputy Commissioner,
Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, India. She holds a masters degree in
English Literature from St. Stephens College, Delhi and a Master of Phi-
losophy degree in Sociology from Jawahar Lal Nehru University, Delhi.
She has written a dissertation entitled “An Analysis of Gender Relations
among Dalits: Literature, Education, and Politics in the 20th Century.”
Through this paper she hopes to combine her keen interest in literature
and social issues.
JOY JAMES is the John B. and John T. McCoy Presidential Professor of

Africana Studies and College Professor in Political Science. Her publi-
cations include: Resisting State Violence: Gender, Race, and Radicalism
in U.S. Culture; Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and
American Intellectuals; Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist
Politics; and the forthcoming, Memory, Shame and Rage: The Central
Park Case, 1989–2002. She is editor of The Angela Y. Davis Reader and
several anthologies on radical politics and incarceration including
Imprisoned Intellectuals; The New Abolitionists; and Warfare in the
American Homeland.
KIMBERLY LAMM is completing her Ph.D. in English at the University

of Washington and teaches in the Critical and Visual Studies program at
Pratt Institute. Her dissertation examines literary and visual portraiture in
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture. Recent
work has appeared in American Quarterly, Callaloo, Cultural Critique, and
College English.
EDUARDO MENDIETA is associate professor of Philosophy at Stony

Brook University, where he is also the director of the Latin American and
Caribbean Studies Center. He is the executive editor of Radical Philoso-
phy Review. His most recent publications have been a collection of inter-
views with Angela Davis: Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Torture,
and Prisons (Seven Stories Press, 2005), and an edited volume of inter-
views with Richard Rorty: Take Care of Freedom and Truth will Take Care
of Itself (Stanford University Press, 2006). He has also written on Enrique
About the Contributors 285
Dussel, Jürgen Habermas, and Cornel West. His newest book is Global
Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (SUNY
Press, 2007).
MARTHA MOCKUS holds the annual Jane Watson Irwin Chair in

Women’s Studies at Hamilton College. Her research and publications
focus on musical performance as a form of queer and feminist critique.
Her book Sonic Feminism and the Music of Pauline Oliveros is forthcom-
ing from Routledge.
KELLY OLIVER is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt

University. She is the author of several books including Family Values,
Subjectivity Without Subjects, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, The Colo-
nization of Psychic Space, and Secret Weapons of War: Women, Sex and the
Media. She is currently writing a book entitled Animal Pedagogy.
RUTH PORRITT is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women

Studies at West Chester University. Her work has appeared in How Shall
We Tell Each Other of the Poet?, The Bedford Introduction to Literature,
Writing Poems, and Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem, among others.
AILSA SMITH recently retired from her position as senior lecturer in the
Centre for Ma\ori and Indigenous Planning and Development at Lincoln
University, New Zealand. She is of Taranaki Ma\ori descent, and gained
her Ph.D. on Ma\ori sense of place as revealed by classical Ma\ori songs
from her tribal area. She has published a book of Taranaki Ma\ori songs
and stories which she translated from family manuscript records, and con-
tinues to explore the frontiers of interpretation and bicultural under-
standings in her preferred research field of Ma\ori cultural geography.
KATHERINE WILSON is working toward a Ph.D. in Theater Studies at

the Graduate Center, City University of New York, with a focus on scripts
and print material in theater. Through the 1990s she wrote and per-
formed alternative theater in New York.
Index
abolitionists, white, 127 America, 110; black, 82; history of

academia, xi, xiii, 8 race and gender in, 124; imperial,
academics, 83 141, 142
Acampora, Christa, xi, 9 Andrews, Regina (also Regina
actuality, 108, 112 Anderson), 15, 231–245
action, 5, 7, 9, 13, 145 anthropology, 82, 83, 111, 112, 118,
activists, 15, 27, 42, 83, 87 250–254
aesthetics, 3–8, 16, 77, 81, 146, 167, Anzaldúa, Gloria, xi, xiii, 1–2, 25–28,
188, 232–233, 248–249; black, 30, 33, 102
185, 232–233; feminist, 16; Apakura, 223
indigenous, 185, 188–189, Arawak, 149
248–249, 258–259; Latin Ardner, Shirley, 238, 243
American, 182–183 Arendt, Hannah, 53
aesthetic, 14, 24–26, 76, 132; muti- Aristotle, 170
lated, 73, 74. See also aisthesis assimilation, 84, 85
aesthetic experience, 9, 71, 72, 76, astrology, 185
78 Auld, Michael, 193
African spirituality, 185 Auschwitz, 146
Agard, Nadema, 189–190 authority, 47–50, 55, 59, 78
Agassiz, Louis, 110–112, 118 autonomy, 5, 77
Agency, xi–xiii, 4–9, 12, 13–17, 53,
57, 59, 60, 67, 68, 71, 73, 95, bad faith, 60, 61
100, 126, 128, 131, 140, 143, Bambara, Toni Cade, xiii
166, 233, 245 Bansode, Hira, 203, 206–208
aisthesis, 69, 71–74 Barthes, Roland, 29
alienation, 235 Bates, Sara, 189
Allen, Paula Gunn, 16, 247, 249, Battey, C.M., 135
252, 254, 256–257, 262–263 Battle of Te Morere, 224
Allende, Isabel, 21–23 beauty, 10, 14–15, 74, 107, 108, 147,
Alvarez, Julia, 8–9, 47–57. See also 153, 105, 158
under revolution Beauvoir, Simone de, 59–64, 66–67,
Amaral, Tarsilado, 182 77–78
ambrotypes, 110 being, 3, 61, 67, 70, 146
Ambedkar, Bhimrao, 199, 202–204 Benjamin, Walter, 146
287
288 INDEX
Bentley, Gladys, 101 Chendwankar, Prahlad, 205

Bhabha, Homi, 73, 156, 158 Chicago, Judy, 126–127
Bible, 49, 98 Chicanisma, 25. See also Xicanisma
Bigknife, Susan, 258 Chicano(a)s, 21–42
Bird, Gloria, 248 Chicano Rights Movement, 184
blackness, 64–65, 68, 78, 85, 107, Chopin, Kate, 40
127, 156 Choreopoetry, 2, 71
black nationalism, 181 Christian, Barbara, xiii
black power, 216 Christianity, 38, 48, 88, 184, 186,
blues, 91 223, 236. See also Catholicism
body, 10–12, 76, 81, 108–112, 148, civil rights movement, 141, 142, 184
154, 170, 172–175, 176, 179, 201; Clarke, Cheryl, 82, 98, 101
and action, 156; and mind, 43; and class, 2, 3, 9, 29, 53, 83, 124; in
performance, 144, 147; as sign, 145; power relations, 47, 50–53
and spirituality, 7, 28, 29; enslaved, classism, 102
73–74; female, 103, 131; in exhibi- clowns 172, 174. See also Kossa
tion, 149; mapping of, 111, 113; Coaticue, 184
racialized, 116. See also embodiment cold war, 141–142, 148, 154
Bordo, Susan, 179 Colette, 53
Brand, Peggy, 6 Collins, Bootsy, 90
Brant, Beth, 248 Collins, Patricia Hill, 82–83, 94
Bryant, Anita, 88 colonialism, colonization, 8, 11–15,
Buchloch, Benjamin, 107 149, 155, 184, 188, 213–229;
Buddha, 205. See also Yashodhara 247–248, 252–253, 256. See also
Buddhism, 204–205 under embodiment
burial traditions, 186, 195 Columbus, 149
Burns, Lori, 99, 100–101 communication, 8, 57, 180
Bustamente, Nao, 151, 153 communism, 27
Butler, Octavia, xiii community, 1, 4, 7–8, 10–15, 32, 40,
Bruce, Blanche K., 136 42–43, 59, 62, 69, 73–74, 75,
102, 247–262
Calvin, Ritch, 8 compassion, 73
Camper, Peter, 111 comrades, 37
capitalism, 10–12, 86–87; struggles consciousness, 28, 66
against, 82 constructivism, 3, 162
Carnegie, Andrew, 239–240 Cornell, Drucilla, 59, 66–67
Cartesianism, 146–147 Cortázar, 29
Casselberry, Judith, 89 cosmology, 12, 40, 172, 182, 185,
caste system, 197, 201, 206–209 189, 223–228, 258
Castillo, Ana, 8, 21–45 crafts, 187
catharsis, 75–76 craniology, 109
Catholicism, 27–28, 183, 189 creativity, 7–8, 10, 15, 54–58, 81, 86,
Chahhande, Baban, 201 170
Index 289
Crisis, The, 231 difference, 3–4

criticism 25, 141; feminist, 199–200. dignity, 10, 13
See also Gynocritics disinterestedness, 3
crucifixes, 48 dispositifs, 142–143, 155
cubists, the, 146 domination, 50, 53; resistance to, 9,
culture, xi–xiii, 2–3, 5, 7, 9–15, 47, 52, 55
24–27, 31, 34, 54, 88, 122, 145; Douglass, Frederick, 116, 136
African American, 134; American, Draupadi, 208
117, 124, 158; black musical, 90; dreams, 250–252
hippie, 155; patriarchal, 38–40, Du Bois, W.E.B, 117, 136–138,
48, 53, 56, 57; popular, 92; visual, 231–232, 241–242
108–109, 135, 138, 140; western, Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 136
81, 100, 103, 126 Dunn, Dorothy, 188–189
Dussel, Enrique, 147
daguerreotypes, 110–112, 115–118,
120 economy, 60, 74, 153, 155; U.S.
Dalits, 13–14, 197–210; Dalit slave, 131
Panthers, 199. See also caste system ecstasy, 14, 72, 96, 97
Dangle, Arjun, 198–199 education, 4, 205–206
Danto, Arthur, 14 Egyptian culture, 182
Darby, Jaye T., 16 Eklavya, 208
Dasein, 146 Eleggua’s crossword, xiii
Das Ge-stell, 146 El Movimiento (the Chicano
Davis, Angela, 10, 82, 86–88, 90, Movement), 27–28, 33–34
94–95, 156 emancipation, 207, 210. See also free-
Daystar, 16, 249, 258–263. See also dom
Rosalie Jones embodiment, 42, 70, 105,
Delany, Hubert, 235 147–151, 154–158; exhibited,
Delgadillo, Theresa, 38–42 149; “The Coloniality of
DeLoria, Jr., Vine, 247 Embodiment,” 141
Densmore, Frances, 249–254 emotion, 162, 179, 222–223
democracy, 238 environment, 12–15, 167–169, 176,
depression, 54–58 183, 186–187, 189, 191–192,
desire, 3, 9, 59–63, 65, 67–71, 195, 219–220
73–78, 99–101, 148, 153, 156 epistemology, 9, 12, 43; black femi-
Dewey decimal system, 240 nist, 83; standpoint, 163
Dewey, John, 72–73 Eros, 77–78
Dewey, Melvin, 240 erotic, the, 71–72, 74, 77, 96–97,
Dhasal, Namdeo, 199 151
dialectic, 118; of seeing and being seen, eroticism, social, 60
156 Essence, 82
diaspora, 185 essence, 107–108
dictatorship, 47–51 essentialism, 3, 161
290 INDEX
ethnography, 25; musical, 82 gender, 3, 8–9, 47, 50–53, 83,

ethics, 167 108–110, 120, 134, 137, 140,
Eurocentrism, 147 142–143, 238
Europe, 28, 31, 153 genius, 8–9, 47, 53–58
Existentialism, 9, 59–66, 145 genocide, 26, 189
exotic, the: consumption of, 153; genotypes, 153–154
reinscription of, 142; geography, 232, 243–245
Experience Unlimited, 92 Gerestant, Mildred, 101
exploitation: 201, 209 ghetto, 84
Gia, 170, 172
Faludi, Susan, 27
Gili, Marta, 120
Fanon, Frantz, 9, 64–67, 78
Glancy, Diane, 16, 247–249,
Farris, Phoebe, 13–14, 185, 189,
255–258, 263
193–194
Goebbels, Joseph, 146
Fauset, Jessie, 235
Goldsby, Jackie, 94
feminism, 3, 10, 13–14, 25–28, 42,
Golden, Thelma, 134
81, 87, 102, 120, 143, 127, 189,
Gómez-Peñas, Guillermo, 11, 30,
191, 245; American, 120, 126
141, 145, 149, 150
femininity, 9, 47–48, 50, 53, 55 101,
Gomez, Jewelle, 101
103, 105, 108, 122
Gordon, Jane, 6
fetish(es), 147, 187
Gordon, Lewis, 6
Fisher, Pearl, 235
Green, Rayna, 168
Fisher, Rudolf, 235
Gregory, Dick, 85
Forbes, Jack D., 194
Grey, Sir George, 226
Foster, Lillian, 101
Guadalupe, Virgin of, 25, 33, 182,
Foucault, Michel, 11, 155
189, 195. See also Tonantzin
Frazier, E. Franklin, 235
Gulags, the, 146
freedom, xi–xiii, 4–5, 9, 49, 53,
Gulf of Mexico, 149
58–62, 64, 66, 73–75, 77–78,
Gupta, Nandita, 14
82–86, 90, 142, 155, 236
Gurav, Anuradha, 204
Fuentes, Carlos, 31
Gynocritics, 199–200
Funkadelic, 91
Fusco, Coco, 11, 141–158
Habermas, Jürgen, 238
futurists, 146
hair, 236
Gaikwad, Sudharkar, 201 Hammonds, Evelyn, 94, 100
Gage, Francis Dana, 127 Hampton, Mabel, 101
Gajbhiyes, Mina, 203 Hannis, Winifred, 91
García Márquez, Gabriel, 21 Hannsberry, Jarraine, 82, 86
Gates, Henry Louis, 137–138 Hardin, Helen, 188, 190
gaze, 2, 11–12, 14, 99, 118, 122, Harjo, Joy, 189, 248
129, 143, 149, 151, 158 Harlem Experimental Theater (HET),
genealogy, 11, 15, 132, 141–143, 15, 232–234, 241–243
220–221, 228 Harlem Free Library, 239
Index 291
Harlem Renaissance, 15, 117, 135, impressionists, 146

231–245 (pan-)Indian identity, 181
Hart, Patricia, 23 individuality, 162–163, 174
Hartsock, Nancy, 12, 162, 163 indigenismo, 181
Hegel, 147 individuality, 5, 10–11
Heidegger, Martin, 11, 61, 144–147 innovation, 164
hermeneutics, 142 Institute of the American Indian Arts,
Hernández-Ávila, Inés, 247–248 188–189
hierarchy, 8–9, 50–52, 126 integrity, 12, 162
High, Frida, 182 intimacy, 37, 95–97
Hinduism, 204
hip hop, 82, 86, 91 Jackson-Jarvis, Martha, 186–187
Hiroshima, 46 Jacobs, Harriet, 122
history, 24, 53, 74, 132, 137–138, James, Joy, 6
140–141, 145, 154, 156, 176, jazz, 82, 91
187–188, 213–214, 252, 256, Jehlen, Myra, 199–200
262 Jessup, Georgia Mills, 194
Hoard, Adrienne, 182, 185–187 Jesus, 33, 38, 89, 98, 101, 189
home, xi–xiii, 4, 7, 10, 14–16, Jim Crow, 148
240–241, 247–263. See also place jinetera, 154–155
and space Johnson, Marie, 235
homophobia, 82, 88–92, 94, 102 Jones, Kellie, 120, 140
homosexuality, 91. See also lesbianism Jones, Lois Mailou, 185
hooks, bell, xvii, 4, 10, 82–84, 94 Jones, Rosalie, 16, 249, 258–263. See
Howe, LeAnne, 257 also Daystar
Howe, Oscar, 12, 162 Jordon, June, xiii
Hucko, Bruce, 168–169 joy, 62, 71–72
Hughes, Langston, 235 Joyce, James, 31
Humane Society, 151 J. Paul Getty Museum, 110
Hurston, Zora Neale, 82 Julien, Isaac, 117, 134
Hurungarangi, 223–224
hysteria, 118 Kachinas, 190
Kahlo, Frida, 183
idealization, 54 Kamble, Shantabai, 205
identity, 2–3, 5–8, 12, 15, 23, 28, 30, Kant, Immanuel, 5
31, 65, 73, 82, 83–84, 91, 124, Kardak, Waman, 205
142, 158, 191, 195, 220, 229, Kelley, Mary, 135
247–263 Kilcup, Karen, 167
ideology, 27, 42, 84, 140 Kilpatrick, Anna, 255
idolatry, 146 Kilpatrick, Frank, 255
imagination, 6–9, 16, 53–54, 56–58, King Jr., Martin Luther, 84
60, 66–67, 70–73, 75, 151, 158 Kingsbury, B., 216
imperialism, American, 86 Klien, Melanie, 53
292 INDEX
knowledge, 5, 15, 64, 66, 83, 118, Lorde, Audre, 8, 9, 14, 71–72, 78,
240–241, 251 82, 92
Kossa. See clowns love, 49, 62, 72, 75, 78, 98, 167,
Krigwa (“Crisis Guild of Writers and 173, 222–223. See also desire; pas-
Artists”), 232–234, 242 sion
Kristeva, Julia, 9, 53–57 lynching, 236
Kruger, Barbara, 135
Kundera, 73 machismo, 26
Kumari, Vijay, 204 Ma\ori: 14–15
Kunti, 208 Madrid, 149, 154
magic, 8, 68–70. See also Passion
LaChappelle, David, xii magical realism, 8, 21–25
LaDuke, Winona, 247 Mahabharat, 208
La France, Melisse, 99 Maharashtra Dalit Sahitya Sangh, 199
LaMarr, Jean, 189 Makere, 224
lamentation, 213–229. See also sad- Malcolm X, 84, 128
ness mammies, 135
Lamm, Kimberly, 10, 11 Manu, 209
land, 15–16; —scape, 213–229, mapping, social, 243–244
248–263. See also place Marxism, 27–28
Langston, John M., 136 Mary Magdalene, 98–99, 101
language, 8, 15, 26, 29, 33, 57, masculinity, 53, 101
68–70, 100, 134, 144, 220, 258 masks, 185, 195
Lanjewar, Jyoti, 202, 206 Massey, Doreen, 238, 243
Lanning, Helen, 235 materialism, 43; Anglo 37, 39, 142
Laroe, Hector, “La Fama” (1974), 86 matriarchy, 43
Latimer, Catherine Allen, 240 medicine, 100, 187–188, 195, 221,
Latino(a), 25, 142, 153 251
Latin American, 142; artists, 182–184 melancholy, social, 54–56
(see also individual artists); post-, memoir, 102
143, 158 memory (including ‘mnemonics’): 16,
LeFebvre, Henri, 243 214–216, 255
legitimacy, 69, 101 Mendieta, Ana, 183
lesbianism, 92, 94, 98, 100–101 Mendieta, Eduardo, 11–12
Leviticus, 88 Mesa-Bains, Amalia, 182
libraries, 231–245 Mestizo(a)s, 26, 28, 30, 102, 154
Lippard, Lucy, 184 Mitchell, Lofton, 234, 242–243
literature, 26, 71, 81 Mitchell, W.J.T., 135
Little Bennie, 92 Mockus, Martha, 10–11
Little Turtle, Carm, 190 modernism, 162, 166, 179
Locke, Alain, 135, 231–232 monogamy, 128
Lomahaftewa, Linda, 189 Monson, Siouxsan, 255
López, Yolanda, 182, 184 morality, 5–6, 72
Index 293
Morrison, Toni, 8, 9, 60, 68–69, 71, Opportunity, The, 231

73–74, 76–78 oppression, 2–4, 9–10, 26, 53–60,
Morton, Dr. Samuel, 110 62–66, 70–71, 95, 110, 112, 140,
mother, -figure, 201–202, 208, 217; 184, 206, 210, 248
-hood, 9, 47, 55, 161 oral culture and traditions, 219–221,
mourning, 223–224 250
multiculturalism, 147–148 organization, political, 2
music, 70–72, 82–87, 90–91, 94, 95, origins, myth of, 172, 226–228
101, 102; epistemological power
of, 81; go-go, 92–93; popular, 88 Paglia, Camille, 27
mythology, 146, 228, 256; Christian, palmistry, 185, 187
41; origins 172 Pandava brothers, 208
parfleches, 191–192
Nadell, Martha Jane, 135 Papa-tu\-a\-nuku (earth mother, Papa),
Naranjo, Michael, 165 217, 219–220, 226–228
Naranjo-Morse, Nora, 166, 169, 189 Paris, 138
Narmada Bachao Andolan, 209 Paris Exposition of 1900, 136–137
National Museum of the American passing, 236
Indian, 179 passion, 49, 59, 61–62, 78; personal,
National Socialist Party, 146 82
nationalism, transnationalism, 238 Patkar, Medha, 209
Native American women artists, patriarchy, xii, 8–9, 26, 28, 33–34,
188–194. See also individual artists 43, 49–50, 56, 98, 204, 207, 209
nature, natural environment, patriotism, xii
186–187, 189, 191–192, 195 Painter, Nell Irving, 127, 128
Ndegéocello, Meshell, 10–11, 81–102 Pawar, Daya, 206
Neal, Mark Anthony, 94 Pawar, J. V, 199
Nestle, John, 100 Pawde, Kumud, 205–206
New Negro, 117, 137–138 peace, 173
New World, 149 perception, 4, 12; cultural, 110, 134,
New York, 51, 55 137; “loving perception,” 68, 74
New York Public Library, 15, 16, performance, 11, 30, 89, 97,
231–245 143–145, 147, 149, 151, 153,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 77 156, 158, 248–249
Nirmala, Darisi Sasi: 207, 209 phenomena, 84
Niro, Shelley, 189 phenomenology; of communication,
nouveau roman, French, 29 144. See also Heidegger, Martin
novios, 48 philosophy, 145, 147
Nuremberg, 146 Phule, Jotiba, 203, 206
phrenology, 109
O’Grady, Lorraine, 103, 185 physiognomy, 109, 111, 116, 118, 137
Oliver, Kelly, 7–9 Pierce, Charles S., 144
ontology, 8, 12, 42, 45 piety, 89
294 INDEX
Piper, Adrian, 135 race, 8, 12, 47, 50–53, 107–111,

place, 7, 14–16, 23, 75, 78, 193, 115, 120, 124, 134–137,
213–229, 231–245. See also space; 140–143, 244–245
home; shelter racism, xii, 2, 8, 10–13, 82, 102–103,
Plato, 5 105, 107–108, 112, 136, 184,
play, 61 188–189, 191, 195;
poetics, 59, 64–65, 68, 71–72, 78 Raini, Ma, 94
poetry, 11, 55–57, 65, 69, 102 Ranginui-e-tu\-nei (Rangi), 226–228
pointillists, 146 rationality, 5; instrumental, 146
Poitras, Jane Ash, 189 Ram, 207–208
Popel, Esther, 235 Ramaya, 207
Pore, Pratibha, 204 Ramirez, Renya, 174
pornography, 94 Rani, Swaroopa, 202, 204, 207, 209
pornoscopia, 151 Ransom, Rev. Dr. Reverdy C., 136
Porritt, Ruth, 12–13 rape, 156, 204
portraiture, 10, 107–110, 112, 116, Rare Essence, 92
120, 122, 132, 134, 138 Ray, Ethel, 235
postmodernism, 109, 179 Reagen, Toshi, 82
postsocialism, 158 reality, 23, 66, 111, 140; social, 62
pottery, 164–165, 169–170, 173, realm, 68, 86; aesthetic, 147; of the
186–187 personal, 94
Powhatan, Rose, 189, 192–193 Reifenstahl, Lenny, 146
Powell, Richard, 187 Reil, Louis, 260
Power, 8, 10, 13, 17, 69, 72–73, 77, relationality, 4, 14
101, 155, 168, 170, 179, 187, religion, 28, 50, 100, 181–183. See
257–258, 262–263; erotic, 9, 99; also Jesus; Christianity; spirituality
epistemological, 148; imperial, Rendon, Marcie, 16, 249–254, 263
143, 149, 151; poetic, 67, 71, 78, repression, 117, 126
92; sexual, 100; Shifting, 47, resistance, 4, 8, 9, 16, 48, 50, 52–55,
50–53; to resist, 48; to see without 58, 60, 71, 72, 83, 140, 148; erot-
being seen, 158 ic, 155; feminist, 94. See also dom-
powwows, 193, 251 ination
Prince, 82 respectability, 10, 14
prostitution, 100, 155, 204 responsibility, 12, 61, 64
psyche, 53, 55 revolt, 56–58, 63–65
psychic life, 53, 57–58 revolution, 47–50, 55, 56, 86, 87,
psychology, moral, 60 154
Pueblo philosophy, 161, 165, 167, 179 Rich, Adrienne, 145, 147
Puritanism, 15 Rogue, Alphonse Bertillon, 108
Rose, Cynthia, 26
Quick-to-See Smith, Jaune, 189, Rose, Ernestine, 240–242
191–192 Roth, Moira, 184
Quijano, Anibal, 147–148 rhythm, 10, 91
Index 295
Saar, Alison, 185 Shawn, Michelle, 108

Saar, Betye, 185 Shelly, Percy, 72
sadness, 12, 173–174. See also lamen- shelter, xii–xiii, 4. See also home
tation Shende, Sugandha, 207
Saeta, Elsa, 31 Showalter, Elaine, 199
salsa, 86 Siddhartha Sahitya Sangh, 199
Sambos, 135 Simmons, Henry, 236
Sánchez, Cynthia, 182 Simone, Nina, xiii
San Francisco, 145 Simpson, Lorna, 11, 103
Sangari, Kumkum, 200–201 Singer, Ed, 190
Santería, 183, 185, 195 Sita, 208
Sapkale, Trayambak, 206 slave(s), 70, 75, 127, 142, 154, 156;
Sartre, 59–61, 64–65 African American, 110, 137
Saussure, Fernand, 144 slavery, 73–77, 90, 110–112, 124,
savitri, 208 137, 148, 155, 156, 184
Schomberg Center of the New York smallpox, 260
Public Library, 233, 239–240, Smith, Ailsa, 14–15, 218
Smith, Bessie, 94
241. See also Regina Andrews and
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 37
New York Public Library
Smith, Shawn Michelle, 108
science: 19th century, 107
Snow White, 103–105
scopic drive, 158
socialism, 27
Scott, Clarissa, 235
sociology, 134
sculpture, 12
Sofia, the Greek Goddess, 41
seduction, 96
somatic semiology, 144, 145
segregation, 233 South Carolina, 110
Sekula, Allen, 117, 118 Soul II Soul, 95
self, 1, 12, 15, 75, 77, 82, 84, 86, sovereignty, white, 156
117, 137, 145, 174, 206–210 space, 7, 14–16, 40, 69, 94, 143,
semiotics, 141–145, 158 214–218, 231–245; magic, 68;
sensibilities, 4, 5 musical, 87; of creativity, 57; psy-
separatism, 85 chic, 66, 70; social, 54, 143; time-
sexuality, 25, 102, 107, 129; feminist space, 219. See also place; home;
politics of, 91; lesbian, 94; queer, shelter
88 Spain, 149
sex, 92, 110, 134, 154, 155 Spain, Daphne, 240
sexism, xii, 2, 10, 12, 82, 105, 107, Spaniards, 30, 154
108, 122, 191, 195 Spanish court, 149
Shabri, 207–208 species, 110
Shaminism, 182, 183, 185 Speer, Albert, 146
Shange, Ntozake, 2, 8, 9, 59, 60, Spence, Eulalie, 232
67–71, 77, 78 Spillers, Hortense J., 10, 124, 126,
Sharpley-Whiting, T., 6 127, 134, 158
296 INDEX
spirituality, 9, 13, 16, 28, 29, 43, 44, telos, 29

181–183, 186–188, 189, 195, terror, xii
217–218, 221, 223–226, 247–263 Tewa, 166, 170, 172
stereotypes, 135; black, 83; racial, 138 theater, 15–16, 69, 231–263
Stout, Renée, 187 “The Hottenton Venus” (Saartje
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 127 Benjamin), 149
strife; economic, 87 Thelma and Louise, 40
subjectivity, 8, 10, 11, 60, 61, 64, theory, 3, 6, academic feminist, 102;
66–68, 95, 108, 126; Cartesian, literary, 5
147; collective, 112; colonial, 151; Tillery, Linda, 88
human, 146; of the Chicana, 30 time, 15, 23, 176, 187, 213–214,
subject(s), 66, 75, 94, 107, 111, 112, 262; time-space, 219 geopolitical,
146, 147, 214; colonial, 142, 151; 142, 147. See also history
desiring, 99; psychoanalytic, 135; tintypes, 110
raced and gendered, 118, 138; Tomek, Ana, 38–39
white, 158 Tonantzin, 184, 189
sublimation, 9, 54–57 tradition(s), 5, 11, 13, 15, 28, 90, 91,
suffering, 12; Christian, 90 94, 109, 144, 164, 255; academic,
surrealism, 182–183 25; literary, 33; of writers, 29;
Sweet Honey in the Rock, 82 patriarchal, 47
Swentzell, Ralph, 164 tragedy, xi–xiii
Swentzell, Rina Naranjo, 164, 179 transformation(s), 3, 7, 16, 70–72,
Swentzell, Roxanne, 12, 13, 161–180, 74, 95; feminist, 82; musical, 98;
189 poetic, 64
symbolic order, 77, 109, 117; of race translation, 8–9
and gender, 140 trauma, xi–xiii
syncretism, 2, 12–13, 181–182, 189, Treaty of Waitangi, 15, 214–218
194 Trelling, Ursala (pseudonym of
Sydney, 149 Regina Andrews), 236
syntax, 25, 105, 112, 156, 158 Tremblay, Gail, 189
Trujillo, the Dictator, 47–51
tabula rasa, 148 truth, 23, 145–147; in lyrics, 95
Tagg, John, 131–132 Truth, Sojourner, 127, 128
Talib Kweli (of Black Star), 87 Tsinhahjinnie, Hulleah, 189
Tamati Hone Oraukawa, 224 Tsuchiya, Tilsa, 182
Tangaroa, 227 Tucker, Luella, 235
Tapia, Ernest, 170
Taranaki tribe, 15
Tarot, 185 Uncle Tom, 135
Te Kahui, 224, 225
Te Rangikaheke, 226 values, 32, 37, 39, 61–62, 68–69, 71,
Te Ua Haumene, 224 74, 220; aesthetic, 2–3; patriar-
Te Whetu, 225 chal, 48, 54–55
Index 297
Van Gogh, 145 Wheeler, Caron, 95, 97–98

Vater, Regina, 183 White, J., 223
Velarde, Pablita, 188, 190 Whitehorse, Emmi 189
victimization, 201 whiteness, 69, 70, 92, 103–107, 115,
violence, xi–xiii, 31, 94, 135, 156 134
Vizenor, Gerald, 251 Wiegman, Robyn, 107, 109, 134,
voodoo 149, 185, 187–188, 195 137
voyeurism, 129 Willet, Cynthia, 75–77
Williams, D., 214
wa\ (time-space), 219 Willis, Deborah, 111, 115–117, 128
Walker, Alice, 82, 88 Wilson, Katherine, 15, 16
Walker, Rebecca, 91, 100 Wolf, Naomi, 27
WalkingStick, Kay, 12, 162, 189, 192 womanhood, 9, 47, 55, 134, 136
Wallis, Brian, 112 worlding (welten), 146–147
Washington, Booker T., 136–137
Washington D.C., 92 Xicanisma, 8–9, 25, 27–28, 42–43
Wasserman, Nadine, 186 Xicanista, 8, 21, 28–29, 42–43, 45
war/battle, 223–224
Ward, A., 215 Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, 25, 30
Weaver, Jace, 247, 252, 257 Yashodhara (Buddha’s wife), 205,
Weems, Carrie Mae, 10, 11, 103–140 208
Wellman, Kiggo, 92–93, 95
Westerbeck, Colin, 116 Zealy T., Joseph, 110
PHILOSOPHY / WOMEN’S STUDIES
UNMAKING RACE, REMAKING SOUL

Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom
Christa Davis Acampora and Angela L. Cotten, editors
Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul explores innovative approaches to analyzing

cultural productions through which women of color have challenged and
undermined social and political forces that work to oppress them. Emphasizing
art-making practices that emerge out of and reflect concrete lived experience,
leading contributors to the fields of contemporary psychoanalytic literary
analysis, Latin American studies, feminist theory, Native Women’s studies,
Africana studies, philosophy, and art history examine the relationship between
the aesthetic and the political.
The focus of the book is on the idea of aesthetic agency through which one
develops different modes of expression and creative practices that facilitate
personal and social transformation. Aesthetic agency is liberating in a broad
sense—it not only frees our creative capacities but also expands our capacity for
joy and our abilities to know, to judge, and to act. Artists considered include
Nadema Agard, Julia Alvarez, Ana Castillo, Daystar/Rosalie Jones, Coco Fusco,
Diane Glancy, Martha Jackson-Jarvis, Toni Morrison, MeShell Ndegéocello,
Marcie Rendon, Ntozake Shange, Lorna Simpson, Roxanne Swentzell, Regina Vater,
Kay Walking Stick, and Carrie Mae Weems.
“This collection makes an intriguing and important contribution to

understanding the experiences and cultural productions of women of color.”
—Bilinda Straight, editor of Women on the Verge of Home
Christa Davis Acampora is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hunter

College and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. Angela L. Cotten
is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Stony Brook University, State
University of New York. They are the coeditors of Cultural Sites of Critical Insight:
Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women’s
Writings, also published by SUNY Press.
State University of New York Press

www.sunypress.edu

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Unmaking Race,

State University of New York Press

© 2007 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

Production by Christine Hamel

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Foreword: “Tragedy Fatigue” and “Aesthetic Agency” xi

On Making and Remaking: An Introduction 1

1 Writing the Xicanista: Ana Castillo and the

2 Everyday Revolutions, Shifting Power,

3 Authorizing Desire: Erotic Poetics and the

II. BODY AGONISTES

4 MeShell Ndegéocello: Musical Articulations

5 Portraits of the Past, Imagined Now: Reading

6 The Coloniality of Embodiment: Coco Fusco’s

III. CHANGING THE SUBJECT

7 Pueblo Sculptor Roxanne Swentzell:

8 The Syncretism of Native American, Latin

9 Dalit Women’s Literature: A Sense of the Struggle 197

IV. HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS:

10 The Role of “Place” in New Zealand

11 Theater Near Us: Librarians, Culture,

12 Into the Sacred Circle, Out of the

Works Cited 265

About the Contributors 283

FIGURE 1.1 Ana Castillo, “Ourselves” 22

FIGURE 6.3 Video still, Coco Fusco, “The Incredible

“Tragedy Fatigue” and “Aesthetic Agency”

Last spring, preparing to leave for a University of California conference

Cultural production that creates a breathing space, or momentarily

Photo of Ana Castillo “Ourselves” appears courtesy of Ana Castillo.

Christa Davis Acampora

they are geographically and historically separated, or they can strive to

1979). By the same token European and North American feminists

Each part of the book is comprised of chapters motivated by and explic-

(e.g., Martinez 2000), primarily the productions of men (e.g., Gayle

archy and class hierarchy is reversed again.” Oliver provides examples of

Part Two focuses on issues of embodiment and the transformation of the

Mendieta’s chapter provides an excellent segue to part Three, which is

high/low distinction as it challenges the categories of the authentic and

women because of its association with “an extension of the (bourgeois)

This book admits of a variety of approaches to enjoying and appreciating

particular order. Each chapter was written in order to open up a distinc-

Ana Castillo and the Articulation

What happens when we refuse learned associations, dualisms,

Each of these passages contains “characteristics” of “magical real-

by various Latinas and Latinos on the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe,

This position becomes something of a paradox for Castillo. While

in Chicano society and El Movimiento. “More precisely, omission of the

Perhaps more important, the fragmented and nonunitary structure of her

Máximo becomes involved with the singer/songwriter Pastora Velásquez

chapter signals the narrative instability and unreliability to the reader.

In employing multiple hegemonic forms, Castillo subverts them by

leaving them wondering where or how to begin their struggle. If they

However, the reader remains uncertain about whether the murder

Julia Alvarez uses the conventions of domestic femininity, womanhood,

domination also open up everyday modes of resistance, how power is not

Alvarez’s novel describes the ways in which femininity and women’s

SHIFTING POWER DYNAMICS

In addition to showing how women’s revolution happens through every-

Alvarez’s fiction thrives on what Julia Kristeva calls “female genius”